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I think there are definite drawbacks to the AMP project. For starters, it seems like the main goal is for Google to own more of the time people are interacting

I think there are definite drawbacks to the AMP project. For starters, it seems like the main goal is for Google to own more of the time people are interacting with the web, rather than anything else. A mark in its favor though is local news sites. They are desperate to be at the top of the search page so when they join AMP, and you look at their AMP pages all of a sudden the loads of dark patterns they usually employ are absent.

andy_ppp 8y ago
Maybe Google could just heavily discount for SEO popovers, slow sites, huge blobs of JS and generally stuff that we all find slow and irritating (i.e. jumpy images). It used to be the case that Google wanted to solve problems of their users but now Google wants to solve the problems of Google.
- throwaway13337 8y ago
  I can imagine a search engine that heavily penalized popovers and other user hostile patterns to have the effect of giving great content since the authors of such sites respect their users more. As Google results have gotten progressively worse for common search terms (try searching anything health related), this sort of filter could bring back the web we see to where it used to be. I'd love to see a nonGoogle search engine like this.
acdha 8y ago
Google could get the same effect by more aggressively factoring page load time & size into page ranking. They don’t because that doesn’t give them control over the ad ecosystem.
- ip26 8y ago
  They did that for years already, I believe. It didn't work.
  - joegahona 8y ago
    I'm not sure if that's true. Even now they claim that page speed is only a small factor in overall page rank, and even _that_ applies to "only the slowest sites." https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-i...
  - acdha 8y ago
    They chose not to make it significant, however, so we have no way of saying that it wouldn’t have worked if it’d been a aggressive as AMP’s targets.
- hombre_fatal 8y ago
  I'd wager it's because the most relevant results for a search don't become less relevant just because they load more slowly. I certainly don't want that as a user. Website performance could be a minor tie-breaker between two similarly ranked websites that have the same information (and it probably is), but I don't see how it could be anything more than a weak signal in a search system where the objective is to find the most relevant results. I'll wait 30 seconds if it means I'm loading the result I'm looking for. That a less relevant website loads in one millisecond is frankly immaterial to me.
wmf 8y ago
Google isn't "owning more of the time"; all ad revenue, analytics, and branding accrues to the original site owner.
vivekd 8y ago
I'm trying to update my site to amp right now. I wrote the thing in django but it doesn't look like django is compatible with amp. I'm switching over to php because it's the simplest language that seems to have CORS headers without requiring middleware packages. It seems like AMP can't even do something as simple as a contact form without CORS headers. I'm sure an experienced programmer could solve this problem easily but it makes things harder for amateurs like me. It also doesn't seem to work with bootstrap so I've had to switch the whole thing over to basscss. It seems like choosing AMP limits the other technology you can use.
- purrpit 8y ago
  > I wrote the thing in django but it doesn't look like django is compatible with amp. This doesn't make sense at all. Even if I hadn't previously built a site on django before which served AMP pages, I would be willing to bet that no pure backend web framework limits what your frontend can achieve. . Also, Things are always harder for amateurs, just keep working hard man.
  - vivekd 8y ago
    I'm using Django templating language to serve up pages with a base template and also allow server side stuff to show up in the html pages.

andy_ppp 8y ago

Maybe Google could just heavily discount for SEO popovers, slow sites, huge blobs of JS and generally stuff that we all find slow and irritating (i.e. jumpy images). It used to be the case that Google wanted to solve problems of their users but now Google wants to solve the problems of Google.

throwaway13337 8y ago
I can imagine a search engine that heavily penalized popovers and other user hostile patterns to have the effect of giving great content since the authors of such sites respect their users more. As Google results have gotten progressively worse for common search terms (try searching anything health related), this sort of filter could bring back the web we see to where it used to be. I'd love to see a nonGoogle search engine like this.

acdha 8y ago

Google could get the same effect by more aggressively factoring page load time & size into page ranking. They don’t because that doesn’t give them control over the ad ecosystem.

ip26 8y ago
They did that for years already, I believe. It didn't work.
- joegahona 8y ago
  I'm not sure if that's true. Even now they claim that page speed is only a small factor in overall page rank, and even _that_ applies to "only the slowest sites." https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-i...
- acdha 8y ago
  They chose not to make it significant, however, so we have no way of saying that it wouldn’t have worked if it’d been a aggressive as AMP’s targets.
hombre_fatal 8y ago
I'd wager it's because the most relevant results for a search don't become less relevant just because they load more slowly. I certainly don't want that as a user. Website performance could be a minor tie-breaker between two similarly ranked websites that have the same information (and it probably is), but I don't see how it could be anything more than a weak signal in a search system where the objective is to find the most relevant results. I'll wait 30 seconds if it means I'm loading the result I'm looking for. That a less relevant website loads in one millisecond is frankly immaterial to me.

wmf 8y ago

Google isn't "owning more of the time"; all ad revenue, analytics, and branding accrues to the original site owner.

vivekd 8y ago

I'm trying to update my site to amp right now. I wrote the thing in django but it doesn't look like django is compatible with amp. I'm switching over to php because it's the simplest language that seems to have CORS headers without requiring middleware packages. It seems like AMP can't even do something as simple as a contact form without CORS headers. I'm sure an experienced programmer could solve this problem easily but it makes things harder for amateurs like me. It also doesn't seem to work with bootstrap so I've had to switch the whole thing over to basscss. It seems like choosing AMP limits the other technology you can use.

purrpit 8y ago
> I wrote the thing in django but it doesn't look like django is compatible with amp. This doesn't make sense at all. Even if I hadn't previously built a site on django before which served AMP pages, I would be willing to bet that no pure backend web framework limits what your frontend can achieve. . Also, Things are always harder for amateurs, just keep working hard man.
- vivekd 8y ago
  I'm using Django templating language to serve up pages with a base template and also allow server side stuff to show up in the html pages.