70 ms·

Google AMP – A 70% drop in our conversion rate

948 points by nate 8y ago

draw_down 8y ago
The downsides of using this (outside the obvious one, that you’re no longer serving your own content) are really surprising to me. There appears to be way more uncertainty in using this than I’d expect. The blank page thing in particular is very scary. Really really bad. (And sorry, someone from Google lurking in to say “uh, we poked at it” doesn’t make it any better)
lawnchair_larry 8y ago
AMP is a terrible product and an abuse of market position, but the ego behind it means nobody cares what users think, and it will be touted as a success on someone's performance review no matter what.
- pohl 8y ago
  It's the most user-hostile thing Google has yet done, and I'm including things like Google Wave, the death of Google Reader, and things like removing "view image" from image search results. I loathe getting AMP results. It's always a struggle to get to the real site.
  - tjoff 8y ago
    I thought google were forced to remove 'view-image' from search results? (to appease the site owners)
  - petagonoral 8y ago
    > including things like Google Wave awkward for me. i really liked Wave.
  - mort96 8y ago
    AMP is actually the main reason I switched from Google to DDG on my phone; for some reason, when I switched from an Android phone to an iPhone, I started getting AMP results, and switching search engines was the only way to disable AMP.
    - StavrosK 8y ago
      Is that why I never get AMP results? I've heard about it a lot, but never gotten an AMP page in the results (obviously, in retrospect, because I use DDG). Too bad it's not a "real" standard that everyone can use.
      - technion 8y ago
        That's correct, DDG is any alternative browser is one of the better answers to this situation.
  - tree_of_item 8y ago
    Why do you think Google Wave was user-hostile?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - jpetso 8y ago
      It was meant to replace email, an open standard sporting many interoperable servers and clients, with something that Google controlled, even though it was theoretically federated. After Wave failed, they doubled down on making Gmail into more of a nonstandard product with reduced interoperability (now requiring Gmail API instead of standard IMAP) and increasingly, embrace & extend functionality such as email expiration dates.
      - rossjudson 8y ago
        It wasn't theoretically federated. It was actually federated. Interop outside Google actually happened. Is something not working with gmail's imap support?
        ce4 8y ago
        Google Talk was also federated for some time. Good old times when we could dream of continents, but it has all drifted away and become islands.
        jpetso 8y ago
        Issues with Gmail IMAP as voiced by other people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16951363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16951363 https://www.dvratil.cz/2014/06/improved-gmail-integration-in-kde-pim-4-14/ https://www.dvratil.cz/2014/06/improved-gmail-integration-in... https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/gmail/9A5oYELFbu8/7iq7WTVrBAAJ https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/gmail/9A5oYELFbu8/7iq... https://github.com/mscdex/node-imap/issues/71 https://github.com/mscdex/node-imap/issues/71 https://freron.lighthouseapp.com/projects/58672/tickets/1247-gmail-labels-with-non-ascii-characters-not-working#ticket-1247-7 https://freron.lighthouseapp.com/projects/58672/tickets/1247... Sure you can still access Gmail through IMAP, but if it works differently enough that using a standard IMAP client feels cumbersome and unfamiliar, is it really anything else than a vehicle to tell people that they should really just use the "better" Google product directly? That said, my original wording of "requiring" the Gmail API was poor and I should have phrased it more accurately.
  - ianamartin 8y ago
    I think marking all http websites as unsafe is tied for first place in the most user-hostile thing ever contest.
    - nojvek 8y ago
      Well http is technically unsafe. How is it user-hostile? You can still browser the page. Just the tiny icon changes near the url.
      - woofcat 8y ago
        I suppose context matters. If I'm browsing a local newspaper the need for SSL isn't nearly as strong as for banking. Also they're moving away from the icon and going to a full "Not Secure" status. Image: https://i.imgtc.com/9DwDQ6r.png https://i.imgtc.com/9DwDQ6r.png
        prophesi 8y ago
        Still, you're only as secure as your weakest link. An attacker could figure out how to break into your banking account using the information they gathered from you checking your newspaper account.
        charleslmunger 8y ago
        Is "Not Secure" a false label? Plaintext HTTP is literally not secure against either a passive or active MITM.
        Endy 8y ago
        If a site does not require personal information, it does not need SSL to be "secure". Webcomics I read, blogs, etc, do not need to be "secured", as they are not requesting data. They do not need HTTPS.
        rrcaptain 8y ago
        MITM attacks can also simply be injecting malicious code onto insecure websites. They don't have to be stealing your credit card info to be harmful.
  - IshKebab 8y ago
    It's not really user-hostile at all. It's great for users. We get easy to identify sites that load quickly on mobile. I waste much less time because of AMP. You could argue it is bad for publishers. But users? Please.
  - recursive 8y ago
    User-hostile? I'm a user, and to me it seems more like google protecting me from the hostility of publishers. I love it.
    - BonesJustice 8y ago
      I wouldn’t mind it so much if Google’s AMP viewer didn’t steal 3/4” of my browser’s vertical real estate for utterly useless gray chrome.
      - zormino 8y ago
        I wouldn't mind if I had an opt out, I don't even want it to be opt in. just let me turn it off.
  - obmelvin 8y ago
    > removing "view image" from image search results This was the result of a lawsuit by Getty Images - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after-google-removes-view-image-button-bowing-to-getty/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...
  - root_axis 8y ago
    Another example of user-hostility: I search google for "X using Y" and I get a bunch of results about X where Y is explicitly excluded, i.e. Y with a strikethru and a link saying "actually search for the fucking thing you typed in"... That's a very frustrating UX. I really should give DDG another go.
- endorphone 8y ago
  "but the ego behind it means nobody cares what users think" Who are the users you're speaking of? The ones on their mobile devices who click AMP links by and large seem to love them. Who hates them, however, are web developers and web exploiters who see it as a threat, a limitation, etc.
  - drb91 8y ago
    > The ones on their mobile devices who click AMP links by and large seem to love them. Really? The main comment I've heard about it (when people mention it at all) is that it messes up the URL. I doubt most people notice anything changed.
    - ggggtez 8y ago
      You are probably overestimating how much people look at the URL outside of tech circles. As long as the page loads fast, I doubt many people particularly care about the URL bar.
      - drb91 8y ago
        How do you share the page with someone then?
        mixedCase 8y ago
        You copy and paste the nerd character soup at the top of the Google firechrome
        endorphone 8y ago
        When you share a page it shares the canonical URL. When you open it in an external browser it opens the canonical URL.
        drb91 8y ago
        > When you share a page it shares the canonical URL. By what mechanism? Because copying the URL from the bar does not copy the correct URL, it copies the AMP url.
- plasma 8y ago
  I hate AMP. Here's my AMP experience on reddit: 1) Click on an AMP link by mistake in google results 2) Get annoyed at the less-functional AMP experience to read reddit (limited replies on AMP page, no JS expansion, etc) It's also super frustrating AMP prevents hold-tap on mobile to open a link in a new window, it just doesn't work. 3) Press the chain link icon to switch to mobile site I've been frustrated and delayed in getting to the mobile site directly.
- nothis 8y ago
  Whenever I read an article on a random website and it says "google.com" in the url instead of the actual website url, I want to scream at the screen. How on earth can that be a good idea?
  - chatmasta 8y ago
    I’m glad I’m not the only one that experiences this visceral action. I absolutely hate it. I use the URL bar to see what site I am reading (who would have thought?!). When I look in the URL bar and it says “google.com” there, it drives me absolutely bonkers.
Boulth 8y ago
> Sometimes I get blank pages. I got them very frequently (as a user). This coupled with the inability to turn off AMP finally pushed me to use DDG as the default search engine.
- kurthr 8y ago
  For several months AMP regularly (70-80%) caused pages to fail to load from Google News through a Chrome browser on Android M. Often after several reload attempts it would work, but sometimes not. Loading through Firefox was always a work around, but URL copy and paste was annoying. I figured it was just tehGoog reminding me to pay attention to other human beings rather than staring at my phone. Then they fixed it with some update, when they realized I was incorrigible (actually I never figured out why).
- RexM 8y ago
  AMP also pushed me to switch to DDG as my default search engine.
  - nate 8y ago
    That's really interesting. I wonder if @yegg knows about this. Might be another nice marketing topic he can explore.
  - dreamcompiler 8y ago
    Same here. AMP is Google's own walled garden, and that plus Google's pervasive tracking finally pushed me to DDG. Enough is enough.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  Google actually deliberately makes the page blank with an 8 second animation to show it again. They remove this animation in JavaScript. https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/spec/amp-boilerplate https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/spec/amp-boiler...
  - ww520 8y ago
kodablah 8y ago
Question: If what makes AMP fast is the restrictions on size, JS, and CSS, and you know this and want to conform to this, why do you need to use AMP? Why not just develop your site like this anyways? Is the lightning bolt really that worth it? I'm not convinced that (any more) Google prioritizes AMP pages beyond the coincidence that they prioritize faster ones and they are faster. Also, I wonder if I'm the only one that avoids AMP-based sites out of principle. I highly doubt it affects your conversions (I'm not really the easily "convertible" type), but makes one wonder if there can be effective web tech boycotts.
- makmanalp 8y ago
  > Question: If what makes AMP fast is the restrictions on size, JS, and CSS, and you know this and want to conform to this, why do you need to use AMP? Why not just develop your site like this anyways? I think aside from the icon and the special treatment mentioned above, don't AMP pages get served directly from google and get preloaded on the search results page? So that's the other benefit, I guess. Whether a few less milliseconds from preloading on an already fast page really buys anything is another question.
  - ebikelaw 8y ago
    AMP can be served by anybody and browsers will preload likely destinations regardless of AMP or not.
  - 52-6F-62 8y ago
    > Whether a few less milliseconds from preloading on an already fast page really buys anything is another question. On the technical side, it hardly matters. If the sales and marketing teams have bitten, they sell to management, and tech is informed they will be implementing it. That's often how these things go, anyway.
- macandcheese 8y ago
  Google creates an environment where you "need to use AMP" because they prioritize search results for properties that have AMP varietals - placing them in the "carousel" on top of search results. You can build a very performant static site, with terrific SEO and social share meta tags, etc. - but without AMP - and still be positioned below another property who's "regular" site is slow and full of cruft but has an AMP varietal.
ryanjodonnell 8y ago
AMP pages rarely work for me when opening from Feedly and sometimes Twitter.
mattferderer 8y ago
I've tried AMP a couple times only to get rid of it. It's a nice bar to set for websites to compete against. I think Google rightfully so should penalize bloated & slow sites. It's easy to create something better than AMP's experience. It takes a little time optimizing your site to create a pleasant interface & experience. The majority of sites I see that are below the AMP bar, are sites that choose to be that way with lots of ads & pop ups. They do it because these things help them make money. So for them they have little incentive to use AMP. A lot of them make some of that money with Google Ads though. So at the end of the day, I really don't see who AMP is for.
- stochastic_monk 8y ago
  It’s tough. At the same time, I think website content should matter over style.
  - yostrovs 8y ago
    Agreed. The obsession with page load times tilts the equation toward sites that spend more money on developers than content creators. Nothing against developers, but people indeed are looking for content rather than fast sites. I'd be happy to wait another second if the site I'm going to visit has more relevant stuff to what I searched for. Perhaps if a site is terribly slow, that's one thing, but differentiating sites based on microsecond differences is preposterous.
    - joegahona 8y ago
      I agree, but is there proof that Google is differentiating sites "based on microsecond differences"?
      - yostrovs 8y ago
        The ranking algorithm is secret, so one can't know much about how it actually works. But, considering how much effort is spent to increase site speeds, the reality is that that's the impression that developers and site owners have.
acdha 8y ago
Google restricts access to the search results carousel to AMP. If they did it in a neutral manner by measuring performance almost all of the criticism would evaporate.
- kodablah 8y ago
  Eek, I wasn't aware they were still doing that, but I confirmed myself. I abhor the practice here, and am now committed to not clicking any more AMP links.
  - dmix 8y ago
    I just searched "news" in Google on mobile and 2 links were non-AMP in my carousel... (ctvnews.ca and thestar.com) but they were heavily optimized in an AMP-like way.
- ebikelaw 8y ago
  This is not true and you can demonstrate this for yourself by just searching on Google three or four times and looking at the carousel. Only the top stories and breaking news / live coverage carousels require AMP.
  - kodablah 8y ago
    > Only the top stories and breaking news / live coverage carousels require AMP. I took that to be what the parent meant. And it's not cool and has never been cool, but I thought they backed off for some reason.
    - acdha 8y ago
      That is what I meant and it does appear that they've backed off at least for the top stories results, which is welcome.
- nkristoffersen 8y ago
  That does not align with their documentation. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/mark-up-listings https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/mark-up-lis... The search results you see just put in the effort to provide structured data to google. You can do this easily and without any AMP integrations by simply embedding structured data (such as JSON-LD) on the page.
vtail 8y ago
The author seem to be implying conversion loss from pre/post which may be affected from many factors including seasonality - I’m wondering why didn’t he do an A/B for a radical design like that?
- joemi 8y ago
  Can you A/B test a site like that? I don't really know how AMP works (so I may be way off base), but from a user standpoint, since you don't seem to actually go to the page, just to Google's AMP version, I'd imagine there's no way to control whether the user is getting an AMP version or not in an A/B way. It seems like you're either AMP enabled (and the user gets AMP) or you're not (and they get the normal page).
  - nate 8y ago
    Yeah, it's not easy to test AMP unless you're doing things like bringing in traffic from Adwords where you can split the traffic up. I do a bunch of testing with that Adwords traffic.
- nate 8y ago
  I did actually split test. I had traffic going to both types of our landing pages. I didn't like the AMP results but there wasn't enough traffic yet to draw the conclusion, so I just put all the traffic there and measure across time periods a bit. As for seasonality, that's a fine argument. But overall traffic was consistent across these weeks measured. Also, our conversion rate was awesome through US holidays like July 4. Also, as soon as I got rid of AMP, immediately our conversion rate is back. It's pretty stark how bad AMP was for us.
  - vtail 8y ago
    Ah ok that make sense. Not sure how you measure conversion, but in our case (I’m in B2C ecommerce) both traffic and conversion often fluctuates, so if one is stable doesn’t mean that the other won’t move.
gervase 8y ago
I'm not sure, but it seems like the site/service this article is referencing is for either coders, or people who need coders, but either way is targeting a more-technical / business-oriented audience. What is the overlap on the Venn diagram between "people who like to use AMP" and "people who are technical enough to need this service"? My first instinct would be that it's low.
- nate 8y ago
  Hey! Thanks for the comment, but I'm not quite sure what you mean. Yep, Rockstar is a bunch of developers helping other businesses make software. I wrote the article because there's a lot of people who are considering AMP whether your technically minded or your on the business side asking your developers (or us at Rockstar) to AMPlify all the things. Thought it would be fair warning for all those groups. Also, I don't write for the sole purpose of "content marketing" to an audience that needs us at Rockstar. I've been a developer for 20+ years. I write what I write about :) Sometimes it'll draw in customers, sometimes new friends and colleagues. And sometimes I just like to show funny pictures of my daughter.
mherrmann 8y ago
AMP simply goes too far for me. Google Search already decides which sites we see. Now they want to control what we see on those sites too? Nu-uh.
just_observing 8y ago
Q: Did Google create - and promote from their dominant position - AMP for anyone but their own interests? A: No. Why would you be so naive to think otherwise?
- cortesoft 8y ago
  This is a pretty silly argument.... every company's decisions are based on their own interest. That doesn't mean that your interest and theirs don't align.
graycat 8y ago
From the OP: "There’s nothing that magical about it. A big part of its performance boost is simply its standards: no javascript, all inline CSS, and CSS can only measure 50KB or less. You’re going to make any page load faster with those requirements." Gee, for my startup, that's the way I wrote my Web pages from the beginning! Microsoft's ASP.NET wrote a little, simple JavaScript for me, but for using my Web pages that JavaScript is optional.
larkeith 8y ago
Personally, I dislike AMP with a vengeance - I refuse to click any AMP search result or link - so I'm glad to see people quantitatively assessing the benefits for their site (or lack thereof) and moving away from it. Now if only we could encourage web developers to still adhere to the better parts of the protocol, the mobile web might become a better place.
- colinbartlett 8y ago
  I hate AMP so much that I switched to DuckDuckGo on mobile more than a year ago and have been thrilled. Search results are as good and I haven’t seen an AMP page since.
  - scottwernervt 8y ago
    Did the same along with Firefox mobile with ublock origin which has made browsing mobile amazing.
  - timbit42 8y ago
    I prefer Qwant over DuckDuckGo.
fouc 8y ago
Does anyone think google is engaging in anti-trust/monopoly-building actions by prioritizing AMP pages
- canadianwriter 8y ago
  The only way they "prioritize" them is with the lightning symbol. They don't get better ranking just because they are AMP.
  - wwhitlow 8y ago
    They get added to the carousel if they are AMP pages which for breaking news stories is life and death now.
  - ninkendo 8y ago
    The carousel on the top of a results page is only for AMP pages, so yes, they're absolutely prioritized. But also, why are you so sure they're not prioritized in the rest of the results? It's very difficult to prove a negative here, and I personally don't trust anything google has said publicly on the matter.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Ranking is effectively higher placement on the page, and the AMP links carousel is the highest on the page. The outcome is the same, regardless of methodology.
    - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      Indeed, when Google claims they don't favor AMP pages, they're being disingenuous. Just like suggestions that you can't pay them for higher rankings: You absolutely can, because Google Ads go on top, and they're barely distinguishable from native results.
  - superkuh 8y ago
    I don't know about ranking, but they do put them at the top of the page. And when you use google with JS enabled all AMP results will be pre-loaded in the background. AMP pages aren't faster. They just feel faster when you go through google search and the hidden background pre-load.
canada_dry 8y ago
Or... maybe it's not AMPs fault (not that I'm a fan of AMP). Maybe it's just that Ruby is quickly going out of vogue and you're just seeing the signs.
- richjdsmith 8y ago
  Ah good, I was hoping for the "Hurdy Hur Hur Ruby is slow so Rails is slow crowd to show" Ruby "going out of vogue" has nothing to do with the authors problem. It wouldn't matter if the author was using TrendyNewFramework.js™, PHP, Django or some GO framework. The issue seems to be the terrible user experience that comes with using AMP. I know I personally hate it and tend to drop off when I see it begin loading. Also FWIW, there's plenty of slow SPA's built on the latest and greatest, and there's plenty of fast rails sites (have you been to https://dev.to https://dev.to recently? It's like ️). Rails is doing just fine.
gizmodo59 8y ago
I’m at the other end of the spectrum. I don’t have a good internet connection and it’s painful to wait for a page to load. If I see the AMP icon I will visit that site than the non AMP site. Oh and I’m in US. If I travel abroad, it’s much worse. As a consumer, AMP has been phenomenal. AMP + Safari reader mode = Best browsing experience.
preparedzebra 8y ago
The speed of the web is scaling very quickly. IMO avoiding JS completely is ridiculous.
- amiga-workbench 8y ago
  JS doesn't just incur a bandwidth cost, you have parse time and then the hit on your users framerate when you naively fiddle with the DOM or override the scrolling behaviour.
Meai 8y ago
AMP has a pretty bad user experience that is unrelated to performance: It's super confusing for me when I am on a news site and the url bar shows a long unfamiliar string. It actually makes me feel like I need to check if I'm on a fishing site or I was misdirected or I misclicked.
- mgalka 8y ago
  It's also annoying to have the amp menu bar taking up space at the top. Screen real estate is scarce and another menu bar at the top is just confusing.
  - j79 8y ago
    In Mobile Safari, it's even worse as the bottom navigation bar is present when the page loads and then stays present. Since AMP uses an overflow technique to handle content/scrolling, the page never triggers a scroll event on the body. So not only do you see a toolbar at the top (which admittedly, slides out when you scroll down), you see the browser toolbar at the bottom (which persists!)
- pmart123 8y ago
  Yes. I feel exactly the same way. Moreover, it also creates an extra step if I want to share the link with a friend quickly. I'd rather have them see bloomberg.com/<interesting-story> vs. google.com/amps/<etc>
  - degenerate 8y ago
    Chiming in to say I 100% agree. People use the URL as a 'gut check' to ensure they are not on some scam/spam site, and AMP screws that up.
    - kulahan 8y ago
      I'd be very interested to see numbers on the success rates of lookalike phishing sites once people get used to AMP and stop checking URLs to see if they're in a valid location. I wonder if you could somehow track this with google trends over the next year or so?
lazycouchpotato 8y ago
I like the idea of AMP but its implementation by Google is so poor. It's just way too buggy for me. Websites will load only as much as my phone's screen allows - when I try to scroll down nothing happens. Other times it's just a blank page. AMP convinced me to stop using Google's mobile website and switch to DuckDuckGo, and as an added bonus I can View Image from image search results. EDIT: Forgot about how Google refuses to serve their modern version of Google.com on Firefox Android. That was the final nail in the coffin for me.
Pxtl 8y ago
Yeah, the display of AMP pages, even on Android devices, is absurdly user-hostile. The textless "link" icon to get to the actual content, the loss of the critical "find in page" command, the loss of screen real-estate when the browser already has a bar. It's an odd worst-of-both-worlds implementation where it has made the compromises needed to display it in a vanilla Chrome browser window, but doesn't actually appear to be a vanilla Chrome browser window with normal Chrome features. And that's not getting into the terrifying power-position it gives google as the host of your content.
cphoover 8y ago
AMP was always a bad idea.
rsoto 8y ago
Unrelated to this topic, but still speaking about AMP: has anyone done integration tests with AMP pages? It seems that it's impossible to achieve that, and since AMP has its own async module with amp-forms and amp-mustache, I'm a little nervous about replacing a normal landing page with an AMP page that has errors on its scripting. I've looked everywhere, but to no avail. Can anyone shed some light on this?
deminature 8y ago
Is there a coordinated campaign going on against AMP? My experience as a user has been nothing but positive, with pages loading in a small fraction of the time of normal pages, while I read nothing but negativity about AMP in developer communities like this one. Am I missing something fundamentally evil about AMP that's not apparent from the user standpoint? From my limited perspective, it seems to be the only force trying to counteract an increasingly bloated and slow web.
- scarface74 8y ago
  AMP Pages at time leaves off crucial content to a story - I've seen it a lot with articles containing embedded tweets. I'd rather not deal with AMP and just go with the real page + an ad blocker. Fortunately, in iOS, the ad blockers also work in certain types of embedded web views (SafariViewController) that my RSS Reader uses.
  - joegahona 8y ago
    That's the publisher not doing things in the AMP-specified way. On massive content sites it's a pain in the rear to maintain both a normal version and an AMP version (and an FBIA version, and an Apple News version), so things like tweet embeds get left out.
- CaptSpify 8y ago
  There's no coordinated campaign that I know of. The negative reaction that I personally have to AMP is that Google started pushing it as the solution to a problem that they helped create. It's just an attempt to lock publishers into Google's ecosystem. If Google really cared about fixing the root of the problem, they would put the AMP icon next to sites that are already small and already load fast, and rank them higher, rather than creating a new platform.
  - Zelphyr 8y ago
    YES! In true American form, we're solving a ten dollar problem with a million dollar solution.
rudygalfi 8y ago
I'm a contributor to AMP and also work on Google Search. We're currently investigating the issue of the blank page that's mentioned in the article. So far we've been able to reproduce the issue using the Chrome emulator; however, we haven't been able to repro on an actual device, either Android or iOS. So we'll keep digging into this. The article also mentions the impact on conversion rate. We're interested to learn more details surrounding this. Blank pages loading for many users would explain a lower conversion rate but we'd like to figure out if there's any other possible cause since it doesn't currently seem like most users hit a blank page in actual usage. I'll get in touch with the article author to see if there's openness to digging in further.
- Zelphyr 8y ago
  It's great that you guys are receptive to these issues but I can't help but wonder if, instead of solving this with what is clearly unpopular technology, we all would have been better off if Google had encouraged better practices? If, as the article implies, Google will give me the same rankings if I do things to get the same performance as an AMP page then I would rather do that.
  - ggggtez 8y ago
    I think the problem is that encouraging websites to load faster, without giving them a tool to do so, would probably result in very little movement.
  - izacus 8y ago
    > It's great that you guys are receptive to these issues but I can't help but wonder if, instead of solving this with what is clearly unpopular technology, we all would have been better off if Google had encouraged better practices? Unpopular where? Between web devs on HN which are the main cause of the web site bloat plague?
    - nostromo 8y ago
      Assuming all other factors are constant — a drop of conversion rates by 70% implies that real users are also getting tripped up with AMP.
orthecreedence 8y ago
Um, google is taking people's pages and hosting them themselves? That seems like a copyright violation to me. If my website was being mirrored by google and they diverted traffic to the mirror instead of my own website, I'd be filing a DMCA pretty quick. Or is AMP opt-in?
- ilikehurdles 8y ago
  AMP is opt-in.
  - orthecreedence 8y ago
    Thanks, I did a lot of searching and was not able to find this info, so I appreciate you answering.
Karishma1234 8y ago
A consultant I worked with would charge lots of $$$ for basically doing to his large enterprise clients. For example we would go into a meeting with 4 random employees and then charge $250 per hour per person. He joked to me and said that this money is essentially "stupidity tax" on these large enterprises because they can't navigate their way through even some trivial tech problems. AMP is one such stupidity tax in my personal opinion. I have worked for many years in web performance optimisation and I realise that every internet business must pay a good close attention to it but most of them are incompetent to do that. Their webpages are bloated. Just check how heavy is the page for forbes.com and you will realise the problem. AMP sets a standard where even with low quality developers you can have nice fast loading pages. It is very similar to those Javascript wrappers that force typed variables and semicolons. IF you are already having a good web team don't waste time on AMP unless there is some real demonstrable benefit.
- da02 8y ago
  What type of consultant was he? Marketing or web app development? Did he have decades of experience to charge such rates? (I agree with everything else you have said. My Xioami smartphone from 2014 is faster than the Packard-Bell computer I used back in the mid-90s... yet companies always find a way to slow things down. They used to do it with Flash. One catalog company even did their ENTIRE website in Flash... when people were still using 56k modems and DSL was not as widespread as before.)
  - Karishma1234 8y ago
    Data integration consultant with around 10 years of experience. Sounds fancy but it was about making sure their Facebook posts also get tweeted, when they post a new YouTube video it also gets published to their FB Page, that they are able to connect their Salesforce with Slack (or suggest them to use Slack) and blah. He even worked with a bank that decided to close down their website and redo entire netbanking in some .net based installable app because it was supposedly secure. After spending a lot of money and a pilot with 10,000 users they discovered that nearly 80% of their users who were forced to use it simply move the money out of the bank. All this was tech incompetence tax.
throw2016 8y ago
The argument against amp is based on moats and monopoly but millions of people who make money from Google are unlikely to care about these things. They will do anything to get better revenue or rankings. This is where consumer choice and free markets break down, and regulations become important. That's why dumping is a illegal, because consumers are not going to turn away from cheap products because of bad actors. In the real world you need regulations.
vfc1 8y ago
Its by far the quality of the content that matters the most for ranking on Google search engine, much more than the speed of the page. If the page speed is acceptable, its going to be ranked over an AMP page if the content is better. Content is the key, build better content, that solves better a concrete problem that visitors have: that is how you win visitors trust and get higher rankings at the same time.
myth_buster 8y ago
> Sometimes the cover-up is more damaging than the crime. I hate walled gardens. What troubles me more is that something that came from addressing a competitor's product (Fb's Instant Articles in this case) has grown to do more damage than what Instant Articles could have in the first place. As for the Google Amp URL, they are working on fixing it. https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/950549603975233536 https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/950549603975233536
- chatmasta 8y ago
  They’re not fixing it, they’re forcing major browser vendors to patch their software to insert a different URL (the publisher’s) into the address bar than the one that was actually loaded (google.com). Personally I hope Apple continues to ignore the AMP standard and leaves the links broken on iOS Safari, because it’s the only way to make it obvious to users what’s happening. Google is trying to sweep it under the rug; hopefully Apple doesn’t let them get away with it.
matt4077 8y ago
There's really not enough information in the article to judge its validity... Some comparisons between devices, as but one example, could support the idea that AMP affects conversion rate (AMP is only shown on mobile). As it is, I have my doubts that the mechanisms he speculates could have such an impact. URLs, for example, are really de-emphasised on mobile.
tomphoolery 8y ago
A 500% boost in conversion rate is 5 people if your original conversion rate is 0%. Quit pretending like what you're doing is special.
- matt4077 8y ago
  0% -> 5 people is actually ∞%, not 500%.
preparedzebra 8y ago
The speed of computers has scaled / is scaling so quickly. IMO avoiding JS completely is ridiculous.
cjhanks 8y ago
My personal experience has been that a large number of AMP pages never load. If I search the article title on Google and click the non AMP page, it loads fine. Even after doing that and going back to the AMP link, still won't load. I am fairly sure the product is not working as expected... My experience is on an Android Pixel 2 - so it's not like I am not a target market.
Jedi72 8y ago
Google you are supposed to help me search digital documents to find ones relevant to me. I dont even care if they're slow, you are a search engine not tye internet police.
nsmog767 8y ago
Google's goal is to not increase your conversion rate; it's for users to go back to the search results and click on an ad. I work extensively in SEO and have never recommended AMP for this reason.
adventured 8y ago
> There’s little reason that a small company website that could load in 100ms as a static site of all HTML and no Javascript is actually a 100MB React app AMP is the developer equivalent of getting a gastric bypass surgery because you refuse to control yourself and live a healthy lifestyle. There's a very obvious solution here to the AMP issues that people keep writing about: stop building massively bloated sites, where the bloat inevitably acts to abuse users rather than provide a better experience. AMP isn't necessary at all. It is that simple. No, you don't need 600kb of CSS. No you don't need 8mb of JavaScript. Just stop building like that, there's a better way. Put your obese, lazy sites on a healthy diet and exercise regimen.
cjbayliss 8y ago
I found the article an interesting read, however I couldn't help but think we are talking about AMP and small sites on Medium. When I download that article from Medium with wget I receive a 142K html file that is surprisingly small in this day and age, but still bloated more than is needs to be. Using this script[0], I was able to get it down to 14K. Then further cleaning it up in emacs and adding <img> tags, I got the html down to 10k. That means it should take probably less than 5 seconds to load the html (not including the massive images) on a 5KB/s connection in Australia (more common thank you might think in the country areas, although getting much better with the NBN roll out) or any other 3rd world internet countries. You can test the resulting html in this gist[1]. Please note I did that in about 20mins, and did not test on mobile, so it is not perfect. I expect the images need to be scaled to fit on mobile. Also I only used the <style> tag to keep it as one file, I don't recommend doing that on real websites. I really hope more people start caring about saving bandwidth and client side resources (CPU, RAM, etc.) [0]: https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/b0042b5c7b46aebd5b40a85855bb4c6e https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/b0042b5c7b46aebd5b40a85855... [1]: https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/4b9f5b5cc7a4dde8efcb4b06c1a7890e https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/4b9f5b5cc7a4dde8efcb4b06c1...
technion 8y ago
100% on Google Lighthouse Something is awry here. Putting AMP on a page immediately gets you points removed for "Uses inefficient cache policy on static assets" for the inclusion of v0.js.
gonational 8y ago
From an end-user perspective, my solution to the degradation of Google was to switch to DuckDuckGo.com. About one year ago when I switched there were a few things that annoyed me, but it’s become a great experience since then... and they’re not tracking me. Do it, and you won’t regret it.
saluki 8y ago
Matrix Dodging Bullets https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQBJiEiB9Os https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQBJiEiB9Os
abc456879 8y ago
Ah yes of course, AMP. If only Turing had the foresight to see how his creation would be used to load bloated JS slightly faster onto your mobile ... ah the possibilities.
pawurb 8y ago
You can remove Google AMP without hurting organic traffic and web performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance
owens99 8y ago
Another thing to consider: Google is blocked in China, so AMP doesn't matter if you are looking for a truly global presence.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
homero 8y ago
Why does Google tell me I'm logged into Google on amp pages? It makes no sense.
auslander 8y ago
GETF (Google Engineering Task Force) says AMP is mandatory. Fix your browsers and move content to Google official servers before January 2020.
xmatos 8y ago
AMP is not about fast websites, better user experience for either users or publishers, nor a trusted platform. It's about google hosting your site and capturing data from it. It's a shitty idea and i can't understand why people use it. Yes, make your website fast, please. There're plenty of guidelines and tests for that, but you don't need amp for that.
eruci 8y ago
The same happened with a site I manage after I enabled AMP. We've been doing the Google dance to their tune for too long.
tyler33 8y ago
Monopolies don't care about you
tdelet 8y ago
AMP is the worst. I used to get rid of it by going through encrypted.google.com, but unfortunately that's been shut down and I haven't figured out how to use google and not use AMP. But I still want to. I do find myself using Chrome on android less and less primarily because of AMP
- timbit42 8y ago
  What about StartPage.com ? It's Google search results without any Google crap.
Proven 8y ago
Lol what a waste of time. Nothing was broken but they had to fix it. Because google knows better
fudoo 8y ago
AMP is just another reason to block third party scripts. If your page is blank, I'm going elsewhere.

948 points by nate 8y ago

The downsides of using this (outside the obvious one, that you’re no longer serving your own content) are really surprising to me. There appears to be way more uncertainty in using this than I’d expect. The blank page thing in particular is very scary. Really really bad. (And sorry, someone from Google lurking in to say “uh, we poked at it” doesn’t make it any better)

lawnchair_larry 8y ago

AMP is a terrible product and an abuse of market position, but the ego behind it means nobody cares what users think, and it will be touted as a success on someone's performance review no matter what.

pohl 8y ago
It's the most user-hostile thing Google has yet done, and I'm including things like Google Wave, the death of Google Reader, and things like removing "view image" from image search results. I loathe getting AMP results. It's always a struggle to get to the real site.
- tjoff 8y ago
  I thought google were forced to remove 'view-image' from search results? (to appease the site owners)
- petagonoral 8y ago
  > including things like Google Wave awkward for me. i really liked Wave.
- mort96 8y ago
  AMP is actually the main reason I switched from Google to DDG on my phone; for some reason, when I switched from an Android phone to an iPhone, I started getting AMP results, and switching search engines was the only way to disable AMP.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    Is that why I never get AMP results? I've heard about it a lot, but never gotten an AMP page in the results (obviously, in retrospect, because I use DDG). Too bad it's not a "real" standard that everyone can use.
    - technion 8y ago
      That's correct, DDG is any alternative browser is one of the better answers to this situation.
- tree_of_item 8y ago
  Why do you think Google Wave was user-hostile?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jpetso 8y ago
    It was meant to replace email, an open standard sporting many interoperable servers and clients, with something that Google controlled, even though it was theoretically federated. After Wave failed, they doubled down on making Gmail into more of a nonstandard product with reduced interoperability (now requiring Gmail API instead of standard IMAP) and increasingly, embrace & extend functionality such as email expiration dates.
    - rossjudson 8y ago
      It wasn't theoretically federated. It was actually federated. Interop outside Google actually happened. Is something not working with gmail's imap support?
      - ce4 8y ago
        Google Talk was also federated for some time. Good old times when we could dream of continents, but it has all drifted away and become islands.
      - jpetso 8y ago
        Issues with Gmail IMAP as voiced by other people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16951363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16951363 https://www.dvratil.cz/2014/06/improved-gmail-integration-in-kde-pim-4-14/ https://www.dvratil.cz/2014/06/improved-gmail-integration-in... https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/gmail/9A5oYELFbu8/7iq7WTVrBAAJ https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/gmail/9A5oYELFbu8/7iq... https://github.com/mscdex/node-imap/issues/71 https://github.com/mscdex/node-imap/issues/71 https://freron.lighthouseapp.com/projects/58672/tickets/1247-gmail-labels-with-non-ascii-characters-not-working#ticket-1247-7 https://freron.lighthouseapp.com/projects/58672/tickets/1247... Sure you can still access Gmail through IMAP, but if it works differently enough that using a standard IMAP client feels cumbersome and unfamiliar, is it really anything else than a vehicle to tell people that they should really just use the "better" Google product directly? That said, my original wording of "requiring" the Gmail API was poor and I should have phrased it more accurately.
- ianamartin 8y ago
  I think marking all http websites as unsafe is tied for first place in the most user-hostile thing ever contest.
  - nojvek 8y ago
    Well http is technically unsafe. How is it user-hostile? You can still browser the page. Just the tiny icon changes near the url.
    - woofcat 8y ago
      I suppose context matters. If I'm browsing a local newspaper the need for SSL isn't nearly as strong as for banking. Also they're moving away from the icon and going to a full "Not Secure" status. Image: https://i.imgtc.com/9DwDQ6r.png https://i.imgtc.com/9DwDQ6r.png
      - prophesi 8y ago
        Still, you're only as secure as your weakest link. An attacker could figure out how to break into your banking account using the information they gathered from you checking your newspaper account.
      - charleslmunger 8y ago
        Is "Not Secure" a false label? Plaintext HTTP is literally not secure against either a passive or active MITM.
        Endy 8y ago
        If a site does not require personal information, it does not need SSL to be "secure". Webcomics I read, blogs, etc, do not need to be "secured", as they are not requesting data. They do not need HTTPS.
        rrcaptain 8y ago
        MITM attacks can also simply be injecting malicious code onto insecure websites. They don't have to be stealing your credit card info to be harmful.
- IshKebab 8y ago
  It's not really user-hostile at all. It's great for users. We get easy to identify sites that load quickly on mobile. I waste much less time because of AMP. You could argue it is bad for publishers. But users? Please.
- recursive 8y ago
  User-hostile? I'm a user, and to me it seems more like google protecting me from the hostility of publishers. I love it.
  - BonesJustice 8y ago
    I wouldn’t mind it so much if Google’s AMP viewer didn’t steal 3/4” of my browser’s vertical real estate for utterly useless gray chrome.
    - zormino 8y ago
      I wouldn't mind if I had an opt out, I don't even want it to be opt in. just let me turn it off.
- obmelvin 8y ago
  > removing "view image" from image search results This was the result of a lawsuit by Getty Images - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after-google-removes-view-image-button-bowing-to-getty/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...
- root_axis 8y ago
  Another example of user-hostility: I search google for "X using Y" and I get a bunch of results about X where Y is explicitly excluded, i.e. Y with a strikethru and a link saying "actually search for the fucking thing you typed in"... That's a very frustrating UX. I really should give DDG another go.
endorphone 8y ago
"but the ego behind it means nobody cares what users think" Who are the users you're speaking of? The ones on their mobile devices who click AMP links by and large seem to love them. Who hates them, however, are web developers and web exploiters who see it as a threat, a limitation, etc.
- drb91 8y ago
  > The ones on their mobile devices who click AMP links by and large seem to love them. Really? The main comment I've heard about it (when people mention it at all) is that it messes up the URL. I doubt most people notice anything changed.
  - ggggtez 8y ago
    You are probably overestimating how much people look at the URL outside of tech circles. As long as the page loads fast, I doubt many people particularly care about the URL bar.
    - drb91 8y ago
      How do you share the page with someone then?
      - mixedCase 8y ago
        You copy and paste the nerd character soup at the top of the Google firechrome
      - endorphone 8y ago
        When you share a page it shares the canonical URL. When you open it in an external browser it opens the canonical URL.
        drb91 8y ago
        > When you share a page it shares the canonical URL. By what mechanism? Because copying the URL from the bar does not copy the correct URL, it copies the AMP url.
plasma 8y ago
I hate AMP. Here's my AMP experience on reddit: 1) Click on an AMP link by mistake in google results 2) Get annoyed at the less-functional AMP experience to read reddit (limited replies on AMP page, no JS expansion, etc) It's also super frustrating AMP prevents hold-tap on mobile to open a link in a new window, it just doesn't work. 3) Press the chain link icon to switch to mobile site I've been frustrated and delayed in getting to the mobile site directly.
nothis 8y ago
Whenever I read an article on a random website and it says "google.com" in the url instead of the actual website url, I want to scream at the screen. How on earth can that be a good idea?
- chatmasta 8y ago
  I’m glad I’m not the only one that experiences this visceral action. I absolutely hate it. I use the URL bar to see what site I am reading (who would have thought?!). When I look in the URL bar and it says “google.com” there, it drives me absolutely bonkers.

Boulth 8y ago

> Sometimes I get blank pages. I got them very frequently (as a user). This coupled with the inability to turn off AMP finally pushed me to use DDG as the default search engine.

kurthr 8y ago
For several months AMP regularly (70-80%) caused pages to fail to load from Google News through a Chrome browser on Android M. Often after several reload attempts it would work, but sometimes not. Loading through Firefox was always a work around, but URL copy and paste was annoying. I figured it was just tehGoog reminding me to pay attention to other human beings rather than staring at my phone. Then they fixed it with some update, when they realized I was incorrigible (actually I never figured out why).
RexM 8y ago
AMP also pushed me to switch to DDG as my default search engine.
- nate 8y ago
  That's really interesting. I wonder if @yegg knows about this. Might be another nice marketing topic he can explore.
- dreamcompiler 8y ago
  Same here. AMP is Google's own walled garden, and that plus Google's pervasive tracking finally pushed me to DDG. Enough is enough.
Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Google actually deliberately makes the page blank with an 8 second animation to show it again. They remove this animation in JavaScript. https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/spec/amp-boilerplate https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/spec/amp-boiler...
- ww520 8y ago

kodablah 8y ago

Question: If what makes AMP fast is the restrictions on size, JS, and CSS, and you know this and want to conform to this, why do you need to use AMP? Why not just develop your site like this anyways? Is the lightning bolt really that worth it? I'm not convinced that (any more) Google prioritizes AMP pages beyond the coincidence that they prioritize faster ones and they are faster. Also, I wonder if I'm the only one that avoids AMP-based sites out of principle. I highly doubt it affects your conversions (I'm not really the easily "convertible" type), but makes one wonder if there can be effective web tech boycotts.

makmanalp 8y ago
> Question: If what makes AMP fast is the restrictions on size, JS, and CSS, and you know this and want to conform to this, why do you need to use AMP? Why not just develop your site like this anyways? I think aside from the icon and the special treatment mentioned above, don't AMP pages get served directly from google and get preloaded on the search results page? So that's the other benefit, I guess. Whether a few less milliseconds from preloading on an already fast page really buys anything is another question.
- ebikelaw 8y ago
  AMP can be served by anybody and browsers will preload likely destinations regardless of AMP or not.
- 52-6F-62 8y ago
  > Whether a few less milliseconds from preloading on an already fast page really buys anything is another question. On the technical side, it hardly matters. If the sales and marketing teams have bitten, they sell to management, and tech is informed they will be implementing it. That's often how these things go, anyway.
macandcheese 8y ago
Google creates an environment where you "need to use AMP" because they prioritize search results for properties that have AMP varietals - placing them in the "carousel" on top of search results. You can build a very performant static site, with terrific SEO and social share meta tags, etc. - but without AMP - and still be positioned below another property who's "regular" site is slow and full of cruft but has an AMP varietal.

ryanjodonnell 8y ago

AMP pages rarely work for me when opening from Feedly and sometimes Twitter.

mattferderer 8y ago

I've tried AMP a couple times only to get rid of it. It's a nice bar to set for websites to compete against. I think Google rightfully so should penalize bloated & slow sites. It's easy to create something better than AMP's experience. It takes a little time optimizing your site to create a pleasant interface & experience. The majority of sites I see that are below the AMP bar, are sites that choose to be that way with lots of ads & pop ups. They do it because these things help them make money. So for them they have little incentive to use AMP. A lot of them make some of that money with Google Ads though. So at the end of the day, I really don't see who AMP is for.

stochastic_monk 8y ago
It’s tough. At the same time, I think website content should matter over style.
- yostrovs 8y ago
  Agreed. The obsession with page load times tilts the equation toward sites that spend more money on developers than content creators. Nothing against developers, but people indeed are looking for content rather than fast sites. I'd be happy to wait another second if the site I'm going to visit has more relevant stuff to what I searched for. Perhaps if a site is terribly slow, that's one thing, but differentiating sites based on microsecond differences is preposterous.
  - joegahona 8y ago
    I agree, but is there proof that Google is differentiating sites "based on microsecond differences"?
    - yostrovs 8y ago
      The ranking algorithm is secret, so one can't know much about how it actually works. But, considering how much effort is spent to increase site speeds, the reality is that that's the impression that developers and site owners have.

acdha 8y ago

Google restricts access to the search results carousel to AMP. If they did it in a neutral manner by measuring performance almost all of the criticism would evaporate.

kodablah 8y ago
Eek, I wasn't aware they were still doing that, but I confirmed myself. I abhor the practice here, and am now committed to not clicking any more AMP links.
- dmix 8y ago
  I just searched "news" in Google on mobile and 2 links were non-AMP in my carousel... (ctvnews.ca and thestar.com) but they were heavily optimized in an AMP-like way.
ebikelaw 8y ago
This is not true and you can demonstrate this for yourself by just searching on Google three or four times and looking at the carousel. Only the top stories and breaking news / live coverage carousels require AMP.
- kodablah 8y ago
  > Only the top stories and breaking news / live coverage carousels require AMP. I took that to be what the parent meant. And it's not cool and has never been cool, but I thought they backed off for some reason.
  - acdha 8y ago
    That is what I meant and it does appear that they've backed off at least for the top stories results, which is welcome.
nkristoffersen 8y ago
That does not align with their documentation. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/mark-up-listings https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/mark-up-lis... The search results you see just put in the effort to provide structured data to google. You can do this easily and without any AMP integrations by simply embedding structured data (such as JSON-LD) on the page.

vtail 8y ago

The author seem to be implying conversion loss from pre/post which may be affected from many factors including seasonality - I’m wondering why didn’t he do an A/B for a radical design like that?

joemi 8y ago
Can you A/B test a site like that? I don't really know how AMP works (so I may be way off base), but from a user standpoint, since you don't seem to actually go to the page, just to Google's AMP version, I'd imagine there's no way to control whether the user is getting an AMP version or not in an A/B way. It seems like you're either AMP enabled (and the user gets AMP) or you're not (and they get the normal page).
- nate 8y ago
  Yeah, it's not easy to test AMP unless you're doing things like bringing in traffic from Adwords where you can split the traffic up. I do a bunch of testing with that Adwords traffic.
nate 8y ago
I did actually split test. I had traffic going to both types of our landing pages. I didn't like the AMP results but there wasn't enough traffic yet to draw the conclusion, so I just put all the traffic there and measure across time periods a bit. As for seasonality, that's a fine argument. But overall traffic was consistent across these weeks measured. Also, our conversion rate was awesome through US holidays like July 4. Also, as soon as I got rid of AMP, immediately our conversion rate is back. It's pretty stark how bad AMP was for us.
- vtail 8y ago
  Ah ok that make sense. Not sure how you measure conversion, but in our case (I’m in B2C ecommerce) both traffic and conversion often fluctuates, so if one is stable doesn’t mean that the other won’t move.

gervase 8y ago

I'm not sure, but it seems like the site/service this article is referencing is for either coders, or people who need coders, but either way is targeting a more-technical / business-oriented audience. What is the overlap on the Venn diagram between "people who like to use AMP" and "people who are technical enough to need this service"? My first instinct would be that it's low.

nate 8y ago
Hey! Thanks for the comment, but I'm not quite sure what you mean. Yep, Rockstar is a bunch of developers helping other businesses make software. I wrote the article because there's a lot of people who are considering AMP whether your technically minded or your on the business side asking your developers (or us at Rockstar) to AMPlify all the things. Thought it would be fair warning for all those groups. Also, I don't write for the sole purpose of "content marketing" to an audience that needs us at Rockstar. I've been a developer for 20+ years. I write what I write about :) Sometimes it'll draw in customers, sometimes new friends and colleagues. And sometimes I just like to show funny pictures of my daughter.

mherrmann 8y ago

AMP simply goes too far for me. Google Search already decides which sites we see. Now they want to control what we see on those sites too? Nu-uh.

just_observing 8y ago

Q: Did Google create - and promote from their dominant position - AMP for anyone but their own interests? A: No. Why would you be so naive to think otherwise?

cortesoft 8y ago
This is a pretty silly argument.... every company's decisions are based on their own interest. That doesn't mean that your interest and theirs don't align.

graycat 8y ago

From the OP: "There’s nothing that magical about it. A big part of its performance boost is simply its standards: no javascript, all inline CSS, and CSS can only measure 50KB or less. You’re going to make any page load faster with those requirements." Gee, for my startup, that's the way I wrote my Web pages from the beginning! Microsoft's ASP.NET wrote a little, simple JavaScript for me, but for using my Web pages that JavaScript is optional.

larkeith 8y ago

Personally, I dislike AMP with a vengeance - I refuse to click any AMP search result or link - so I'm glad to see people quantitatively assessing the benefits for their site (or lack thereof) and moving away from it. Now if only we could encourage web developers to still adhere to the better parts of the protocol, the mobile web might become a better place.

colinbartlett 8y ago
I hate AMP so much that I switched to DuckDuckGo on mobile more than a year ago and have been thrilled. Search results are as good and I haven’t seen an AMP page since.
- scottwernervt 8y ago
  Did the same along with Firefox mobile with ublock origin which has made browsing mobile amazing.
- timbit42 8y ago
  I prefer Qwant over DuckDuckGo.

fouc 8y ago

Does anyone think google is engaging in anti-trust/monopoly-building actions by prioritizing AMP pages

canadianwriter 8y ago
The only way they "prioritize" them is with the lightning symbol. They don't get better ranking just because they are AMP.
- wwhitlow 8y ago
  They get added to the carousel if they are AMP pages which for breaking news stories is life and death now.
- ninkendo 8y ago
  The carousel on the top of a results page is only for AMP pages, so yes, they're absolutely prioritized. But also, why are you so sure they're not prioritized in the rest of the results? It's very difficult to prove a negative here, and I personally don't trust anything google has said publicly on the matter.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Ranking is effectively higher placement on the page, and the AMP links carousel is the highest on the page. The outcome is the same, regardless of methodology.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    Indeed, when Google claims they don't favor AMP pages, they're being disingenuous. Just like suggestions that you can't pay them for higher rankings: You absolutely can, because Google Ads go on top, and they're barely distinguishable from native results.
- superkuh 8y ago
  I don't know about ranking, but they do put them at the top of the page. And when you use google with JS enabled all AMP results will be pre-loaded in the background. AMP pages aren't faster. They just feel faster when you go through google search and the hidden background pre-load.

canada_dry 8y ago

Or... maybe it's not AMPs fault (not that I'm a fan of AMP). Maybe it's just that Ruby is quickly going out of vogue and you're just seeing the signs.

richjdsmith 8y ago
Ah good, I was hoping for the "Hurdy Hur Hur Ruby is slow so Rails is slow crowd to show" Ruby "going out of vogue" has nothing to do with the authors problem. It wouldn't matter if the author was using TrendyNewFramework.js™, PHP, Django or some GO framework. The issue seems to be the terrible user experience that comes with using AMP. I know I personally hate it and tend to drop off when I see it begin loading. Also FWIW, there's plenty of slow SPA's built on the latest and greatest, and there's plenty of fast rails sites (have you been to https://dev.to https://dev.to recently? It's like ️). Rails is doing just fine.

gizmodo59 8y ago

I’m at the other end of the spectrum. I don’t have a good internet connection and it’s painful to wait for a page to load. If I see the AMP icon I will visit that site than the non AMP site. Oh and I’m in US. If I travel abroad, it’s much worse. As a consumer, AMP has been phenomenal. AMP + Safari reader mode = Best browsing experience.

preparedzebra 8y ago

The speed of the web is scaling very quickly. IMO avoiding JS completely is ridiculous.

amiga-workbench 8y ago
JS doesn't just incur a bandwidth cost, you have parse time and then the hit on your users framerate when you naively fiddle with the DOM or override the scrolling behaviour.

Meai 8y ago

AMP has a pretty bad user experience that is unrelated to performance: It's super confusing for me when I am on a news site and the url bar shows a long unfamiliar string. It actually makes me feel like I need to check if I'm on a fishing site or I was misdirected or I misclicked.

mgalka 8y ago
It's also annoying to have the amp menu bar taking up space at the top. Screen real estate is scarce and another menu bar at the top is just confusing.
- j79 8y ago
  In Mobile Safari, it's even worse as the bottom navigation bar is present when the page loads and then stays present. Since AMP uses an overflow technique to handle content/scrolling, the page never triggers a scroll event on the body. So not only do you see a toolbar at the top (which admittedly, slides out when you scroll down), you see the browser toolbar at the bottom (which persists!)
pmart123 8y ago
Yes. I feel exactly the same way. Moreover, it also creates an extra step if I want to share the link with a friend quickly. I'd rather have them see bloomberg.com/<interesting-story> vs. google.com/amps/<etc>
- degenerate 8y ago
  Chiming in to say I 100% agree. People use the URL as a 'gut check' to ensure they are not on some scam/spam site, and AMP screws that up.
  - kulahan 8y ago
    I'd be very interested to see numbers on the success rates of lookalike phishing sites once people get used to AMP and stop checking URLs to see if they're in a valid location. I wonder if you could somehow track this with google trends over the next year or so?

lazycouchpotato 8y ago

I like the idea of AMP but its implementation by Google is so poor. It's just way too buggy for me. Websites will load only as much as my phone's screen allows - when I try to scroll down nothing happens. Other times it's just a blank page. AMP convinced me to stop using Google's mobile website and switch to DuckDuckGo, and as an added bonus I can View Image from image search results. EDIT: Forgot about how Google refuses to serve their modern version of Google.com on Firefox Android. That was the final nail in the coffin for me.

Pxtl 8y ago

Yeah, the display of AMP pages, even on Android devices, is absurdly user-hostile. The textless "link" icon to get to the actual content, the loss of the critical "find in page" command, the loss of screen real-estate when the browser already has a bar. It's an odd worst-of-both-worlds implementation where it has made the compromises needed to display it in a vanilla Chrome browser window, but doesn't actually appear to be a vanilla Chrome browser window with normal Chrome features. And that's not getting into the terrifying power-position it gives google as the host of your content.

cphoover 8y ago

AMP was always a bad idea.

rsoto 8y ago

Unrelated to this topic, but still speaking about AMP: has anyone done integration tests with AMP pages? It seems that it's impossible to achieve that, and since AMP has its own async module with amp-forms and amp-mustache, I'm a little nervous about replacing a normal landing page with an AMP page that has errors on its scripting. I've looked everywhere, but to no avail. Can anyone shed some light on this?

deminature 8y ago

Is there a coordinated campaign going on against AMP? My experience as a user has been nothing but positive, with pages loading in a small fraction of the time of normal pages, while I read nothing but negativity about AMP in developer communities like this one. Am I missing something fundamentally evil about AMP that's not apparent from the user standpoint? From my limited perspective, it seems to be the only force trying to counteract an increasingly bloated and slow web.

scarface74 8y ago
AMP Pages at time leaves off crucial content to a story - I've seen it a lot with articles containing embedded tweets. I'd rather not deal with AMP and just go with the real page + an ad blocker. Fortunately, in iOS, the ad blockers also work in certain types of embedded web views (SafariViewController) that my RSS Reader uses.
- joegahona 8y ago
  That's the publisher not doing things in the AMP-specified way. On massive content sites it's a pain in the rear to maintain both a normal version and an AMP version (and an FBIA version, and an Apple News version), so things like tweet embeds get left out.
CaptSpify 8y ago
There's no coordinated campaign that I know of. The negative reaction that I personally have to AMP is that Google started pushing it as the solution to a problem that they helped create. It's just an attempt to lock publishers into Google's ecosystem. If Google really cared about fixing the root of the problem, they would put the AMP icon next to sites that are already small and already load fast, and rank them higher, rather than creating a new platform.
- Zelphyr 8y ago
  YES! In true American form, we're solving a ten dollar problem with a million dollar solution.

rudygalfi 8y ago

I'm a contributor to AMP and also work on Google Search. We're currently investigating the issue of the blank page that's mentioned in the article. So far we've been able to reproduce the issue using the Chrome emulator; however, we haven't been able to repro on an actual device, either Android or iOS. So we'll keep digging into this. The article also mentions the impact on conversion rate. We're interested to learn more details surrounding this. Blank pages loading for many users would explain a lower conversion rate but we'd like to figure out if there's any other possible cause since it doesn't currently seem like most users hit a blank page in actual usage. I'll get in touch with the article author to see if there's openness to digging in further.

Zelphyr 8y ago
It's great that you guys are receptive to these issues but I can't help but wonder if, instead of solving this with what is clearly unpopular technology, we all would have been better off if Google had encouraged better practices? If, as the article implies, Google will give me the same rankings if I do things to get the same performance as an AMP page then I would rather do that.
- ggggtez 8y ago
  I think the problem is that encouraging websites to load faster, without giving them a tool to do so, would probably result in very little movement.
- izacus 8y ago
  > It's great that you guys are receptive to these issues but I can't help but wonder if, instead of solving this with what is clearly unpopular technology, we all would have been better off if Google had encouraged better practices? Unpopular where? Between web devs on HN which are the main cause of the web site bloat plague?
  - nostromo 8y ago
    Assuming all other factors are constant — a drop of conversion rates by 70% implies that real users are also getting tripped up with AMP.

orthecreedence 8y ago

Um, google is taking people's pages and hosting them themselves? That seems like a copyright violation to me. If my website was being mirrored by google and they diverted traffic to the mirror instead of my own website, I'd be filing a DMCA pretty quick. Or is AMP opt-in?

ilikehurdles 8y ago
AMP is opt-in.
- orthecreedence 8y ago
  Thanks, I did a lot of searching and was not able to find this info, so I appreciate you answering.

Karishma1234 8y ago

A consultant I worked with would charge lots of $$$ for basically doing to his large enterprise clients. For example we would go into a meeting with 4 random employees and then charge $250 per hour per person. He joked to me and said that this money is essentially "stupidity tax" on these large enterprises because they can't navigate their way through even some trivial tech problems. AMP is one such stupidity tax in my personal opinion. I have worked for many years in web performance optimisation and I realise that every internet business must pay a good close attention to it but most of them are incompetent to do that. Their webpages are bloated. Just check how heavy is the page for forbes.com and you will realise the problem. AMP sets a standard where even with low quality developers you can have nice fast loading pages. It is very similar to those Javascript wrappers that force typed variables and semicolons. IF you are already having a good web team don't waste time on AMP unless there is some real demonstrable benefit.

da02 8y ago
What type of consultant was he? Marketing or web app development? Did he have decades of experience to charge such rates? (I agree with everything else you have said. My Xioami smartphone from 2014 is faster than the Packard-Bell computer I used back in the mid-90s... yet companies always find a way to slow things down. They used to do it with Flash. One catalog company even did their ENTIRE website in Flash... when people were still using 56k modems and DSL was not as widespread as before.)
- Karishma1234 8y ago
  Data integration consultant with around 10 years of experience. Sounds fancy but it was about making sure their Facebook posts also get tweeted, when they post a new YouTube video it also gets published to their FB Page, that they are able to connect their Salesforce with Slack (or suggest them to use Slack) and blah. He even worked with a bank that decided to close down their website and redo entire netbanking in some .net based installable app because it was supposedly secure. After spending a lot of money and a pilot with 10,000 users they discovered that nearly 80% of their users who were forced to use it simply move the money out of the bank. All this was tech incompetence tax.

throw2016 8y ago

The argument against amp is based on moats and monopoly but millions of people who make money from Google are unlikely to care about these things. They will do anything to get better revenue or rankings. This is where consumer choice and free markets break down, and regulations become important. That's why dumping is a illegal, because consumers are not going to turn away from cheap products because of bad actors. In the real world you need regulations.

vfc1 8y ago

Its by far the quality of the content that matters the most for ranking on Google search engine, much more than the speed of the page. If the page speed is acceptable, its going to be ranked over an AMP page if the content is better. Content is the key, build better content, that solves better a concrete problem that visitors have: that is how you win visitors trust and get higher rankings at the same time.

myth_buster 8y ago

> Sometimes the cover-up is more damaging than the crime. I hate walled gardens. What troubles me more is that something that came from addressing a competitor's product (Fb's Instant Articles in this case) has grown to do more damage than what Instant Articles could have in the first place. As for the Google Amp URL, they are working on fixing it. https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/950549603975233536 https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/950549603975233536

chatmasta 8y ago
They’re not fixing it, they’re forcing major browser vendors to patch their software to insert a different URL (the publisher’s) into the address bar than the one that was actually loaded (google.com). Personally I hope Apple continues to ignore the AMP standard and leaves the links broken on iOS Safari, because it’s the only way to make it obvious to users what’s happening. Google is trying to sweep it under the rug; hopefully Apple doesn’t let them get away with it.

matt4077 8y ago

There's really not enough information in the article to judge its validity... Some comparisons between devices, as but one example, could support the idea that AMP affects conversion rate (AMP is only shown on mobile). As it is, I have my doubts that the mechanisms he speculates could have such an impact. URLs, for example, are really de-emphasised on mobile.

tomphoolery 8y ago

A 500% boost in conversion rate is 5 people if your original conversion rate is 0%. Quit pretending like what you're doing is special.

matt4077 8y ago
0% -> 5 people is actually ∞%, not 500%.

preparedzebra 8y ago

The speed of computers has scaled / is scaling so quickly. IMO avoiding JS completely is ridiculous.

cjhanks 8y ago

My personal experience has been that a large number of AMP pages never load. If I search the article title on Google and click the non AMP page, it loads fine. Even after doing that and going back to the AMP link, still won't load. I am fairly sure the product is not working as expected... My experience is on an Android Pixel 2 - so it's not like I am not a target market.

Jedi72 8y ago

Google you are supposed to help me search digital documents to find ones relevant to me. I dont even care if they're slow, you are a search engine not tye internet police.

nsmog767 8y ago

Google's goal is to not increase your conversion rate; it's for users to go back to the search results and click on an ad. I work extensively in SEO and have never recommended AMP for this reason.

adventured 8y ago

> There’s little reason that a small company website that could load in 100ms as a static site of all HTML and no Javascript is actually a 100MB React app AMP is the developer equivalent of getting a gastric bypass surgery because you refuse to control yourself and live a healthy lifestyle. There's a very obvious solution here to the AMP issues that people keep writing about: stop building massively bloated sites, where the bloat inevitably acts to abuse users rather than provide a better experience. AMP isn't necessary at all. It is that simple. No, you don't need 600kb of CSS. No you don't need 8mb of JavaScript. Just stop building like that, there's a better way. Put your obese, lazy sites on a healthy diet and exercise regimen.

cjbayliss 8y ago

I found the article an interesting read, however I couldn't help but think we are talking about AMP and small sites on Medium. When I download that article from Medium with wget I receive a 142K html file that is surprisingly small in this day and age, but still bloated more than is needs to be. Using this script[0], I was able to get it down to 14K. Then further cleaning it up in emacs and adding <img> tags, I got the html down to 10k. That means it should take probably less than 5 seconds to load the html (not including the massive images) on a 5KB/s connection in Australia (more common thank you might think in the country areas, although getting much better with the NBN roll out) or any other 3rd world internet countries. You can test the resulting html in this gist[1]. Please note I did that in about 20mins, and did not test on mobile, so it is not perfect. I expect the images need to be scaled to fit on mobile. Also I only used the <style> tag to keep it as one file, I don't recommend doing that on real websites. I really hope more people start caring about saving bandwidth and client side resources (CPU, RAM, etc.) [0]: https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/b0042b5c7b46aebd5b40a85855bb4c6e https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/b0042b5c7b46aebd5b40a85855... [1]: https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/4b9f5b5cc7a4dde8efcb4b06c1a7890e https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/4b9f5b5cc7a4dde8efcb4b06c1...

technion 8y ago

100% on Google Lighthouse Something is awry here. Putting AMP on a page immediately gets you points removed for "Uses inefficient cache policy on static assets" for the inclusion of v0.js.

gonational 8y ago

From an end-user perspective, my solution to the degradation of Google was to switch to DuckDuckGo.com. About one year ago when I switched there were a few things that annoyed me, but it’s become a great experience since then... and they’re not tracking me. Do it, and you won’t regret it.

saluki 8y ago

Matrix Dodging Bullets https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQBJiEiB9Os https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQBJiEiB9Os

abc456879 8y ago

Ah yes of course, AMP. If only Turing had the foresight to see how his creation would be used to load bloated JS slightly faster onto your mobile ... ah the possibilities.

pawurb 8y ago

You can remove Google AMP without hurting organic traffic and web performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance

owens99 8y ago

Another thing to consider: Google is blocked in China, so AMP doesn't matter if you are looking for a truly global presence.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

homero 8y ago

Why does Google tell me I'm logged into Google on amp pages? It makes no sense.

auslander 8y ago

GETF (Google Engineering Task Force) says AMP is mandatory. Fix your browsers and move content to Google official servers before January 2020.

xmatos 8y ago

AMP is not about fast websites, better user experience for either users or publishers, nor a trusted platform. It's about google hosting your site and capturing data from it. It's a shitty idea and i can't understand why people use it. Yes, make your website fast, please. There're plenty of guidelines and tests for that, but you don't need amp for that.

eruci 8y ago

The same happened with a site I manage after I enabled AMP. We've been doing the Google dance to their tune for too long.

tyler33 8y ago

Monopolies don't care about you

tdelet 8y ago

AMP is the worst. I used to get rid of it by going through encrypted.google.com, but unfortunately that's been shut down and I haven't figured out how to use google and not use AMP. But I still want to. I do find myself using Chrome on android less and less primarily because of AMP

timbit42 8y ago
What about StartPage.com ? It's Google search results without any Google crap.

Proven 8y ago

Lol what a waste of time. Nothing was broken but they had to fix it. Because google knows better

fudoo 8y ago

AMP is just another reason to block third party scripts. If your page is blank, I'm going elsewhere.