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Ehh, I disagree with your assessment, and to illustrate why I think you need to focus on asblockers. AMP serves a critical strategic purpose: it severely disin

by jfasi 8y ago

Ehh, I disagree with your assessment, and to illustrate why I think you need to focus on asblockers. AMP serves a critical strategic purpose: it severely disincentivizes crappy, JS-heavy websites on search results and as a result makes people less likely to install adblockers. Google is terrified of adblockers going mainstream, to the point where they’re willing to risk anticompetitive suits by creating their own. AMP is a part of the effort to prevent that from happening.

geofft 8y ago
That's an interesting viewpoint and makes a lot of sense, but still - why couldn't Google have accomplished this goal through web search policies? Have the crawler say that if it sees JavaScript with certain behavior it will be de-prioritized compared to a similar website with less annoying JavaScript. Which, to some extent, you get just by focusing on load time: if the crawler emulates a normal browser and measures the time until everything has rendered, it'd be able to penalize annoying JS ads that block loading. Or if it emulates a normal browser and indexes text rendered on the screen, it'd be able to penalize sites that display a pop-over ad that you have to interact with. (Would that have been more prone to an antitrust lawsuit than AMP?)
- jfasi 8y ago
  I don’t want to speculate too much on the legals of the situation, so I won’t talk about anticompetitive matters. As for why not do this in indexing, of course they’re doing that. They’ve been doing that for a very long time, but that approach can only go so far. There’s a constant cat and mouse game between websites and search providers, and AMP is a way to end it once and for all. It’s important to stress that the motivation here is largely user-focused. People tend to ascribe to Google these shady Oracle-like motivations around screwing users and developers, but the truth is that moves like this are largely motivated by a desire to improve the experience. Not out of any sort of altruism, mind you, but because what’s good for the user is generally good for Google.
  - geofft 8y ago
    I'm not ascribing Google a motivation of wanting to screw over users and developers. I'm ascribing Google-as-a-whole the motivation of wanting to improve the experience because that's good for Google's bottom line, and Google-as-individual-employees the motivation of wanting to do that by shipping new products instead of shipping improvements because that's good for their personal bottom line. Neither of these are shady. They are both individually rational decisions. You don't become Google because you altruistically want to help people without profit; you don't work for Google for that reason, either. You work for Google because you want to do interesting work while being paid well. I think Google made lots of mistakes with AMP that will be long-term harmful for the web, but I don't think they were malicious in doing so—they made genuine mistakes that it just so happens they wouldn't have been incentivized to make if there were no individual pressure to ship products. I'm just saying that this pressure exists, and that I personally don't want to be subject to it.
  - fjabre 8y ago
    Google's only obligation is to its shareholders. AMP serves its interests. So does building covert search engines to help root out chinese dissidents. That 'cat and mouse' game is the natural order of things. There is no stopping that other than making things anti-competitive which is what Alphabet clearly wants to do. Google has become evil and we should expect nothing less from a multibillion dollar conglomerate like Alphabet. This isnt the Google we grew up with. This is the publically traded company Alphabet which will do anything to increase their bottom line whether its ruining the internet with things like AMP or selling search services used to imprison chinese citizens. Google should be ashamed of itself. Would never take a job at a company like Alphabet. It conflicts with my sense of ethics and morality.
    - geofft 8y ago
      What is a "company like Alphabet"? Can any company of the size and scale of Alphabet, or aiming to be such one day, avoid these pressures? Why isn't this the Google we grew up with, given that this is what Google was growing up to be all along? A serious question is whether a young company in roughly the state Google was in the early '00s can reasonably commit to never becoming a multibillion-dollar conglomerate.
- pradn 8y ago
  Measuring load times and ranking sites that way produces a relative ordering of fast and relevant sites. (Slow sites can still do well if they're faster than other sites.) Making sites implement AMP absolutely ensures that the site is fast. Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on any AMP related stuff.
otabdeveloper1 8y ago
> AMP serves a critical strategic purpose: it severely disincentivizes visiting a non-Google branded site. Fixed it for ya. P.S. Google sucks balls.
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't do this here.
Jasper_ 8y ago
> AMP serves a critical strategic purpose: it severely disincentivizes crappy, JS-heavy websites on search results and as a result makes people less likely to install adblockers. The slowest, most resource-intensive web sites I visit are, in order: Slack, GMail, and Google Play Music. If Google wants others to take web performance seriously, they should start with their own internal stuff.
- what_ever 8y ago
  Are Slack, GMail, Google Play Music websites or web applications? AMP is not applicable to sites/applications that remain open in your tabs all the time. I think it's more applicable to pages you open, consume the information and close the tab in couple of minutes. Disc: Googler but nowhere close to AMP.
  - Jasper_ 8y ago
    Let's say Google Maps then. It will show up in search results, artificially at the top because of close integration, but performs incredibly poorly. I can't take their claims about AMP being about performance seriously when they do not seem to make any attempt at optimizing the stuff that they put on top.
    - what_ever 8y ago
      Sorry missed this. I don't consider Google Maps a website as well. Specially not a static website that AMP is targetting. You move around in maps, give it input and it gives you a different output.

by jfasi 8y ago

geofft 8y ago

That's an interesting viewpoint and makes a lot of sense, but still - why couldn't Google have accomplished this goal through web search policies? Have the crawler say that if it sees JavaScript with certain behavior it will be de-prioritized compared to a similar website with less annoying JavaScript. Which, to some extent, you get just by focusing on load time: if the crawler emulates a normal browser and measures the time until everything has rendered, it'd be able to penalize annoying JS ads that block loading. Or if it emulates a normal browser and indexes text rendered on the screen, it'd be able to penalize sites that display a pop-over ad that you have to interact with. (Would that have been more prone to an antitrust lawsuit than AMP?)

jfasi 8y ago
I don’t want to speculate too much on the legals of the situation, so I won’t talk about anticompetitive matters. As for why not do this in indexing, of course they’re doing that. They’ve been doing that for a very long time, but that approach can only go so far. There’s a constant cat and mouse game between websites and search providers, and AMP is a way to end it once and for all. It’s important to stress that the motivation here is largely user-focused. People tend to ascribe to Google these shady Oracle-like motivations around screwing users and developers, but the truth is that moves like this are largely motivated by a desire to improve the experience. Not out of any sort of altruism, mind you, but because what’s good for the user is generally good for Google.
- geofft 8y ago
  I'm not ascribing Google a motivation of wanting to screw over users and developers. I'm ascribing Google-as-a-whole the motivation of wanting to improve the experience because that's good for Google's bottom line, and Google-as-individual-employees the motivation of wanting to do that by shipping new products instead of shipping improvements because that's good for their personal bottom line. Neither of these are shady. They are both individually rational decisions. You don't become Google because you altruistically want to help people without profit; you don't work for Google for that reason, either. You work for Google because you want to do interesting work while being paid well. I think Google made lots of mistakes with AMP that will be long-term harmful for the web, but I don't think they were malicious in doing so—they made genuine mistakes that it just so happens they wouldn't have been incentivized to make if there were no individual pressure to ship products. I'm just saying that this pressure exists, and that I personally don't want to be subject to it.
- fjabre 8y ago
  Google's only obligation is to its shareholders. AMP serves its interests. So does building covert search engines to help root out chinese dissidents. That 'cat and mouse' game is the natural order of things. There is no stopping that other than making things anti-competitive which is what Alphabet clearly wants to do. Google has become evil and we should expect nothing less from a multibillion dollar conglomerate like Alphabet. This isnt the Google we grew up with. This is the publically traded company Alphabet which will do anything to increase their bottom line whether its ruining the internet with things like AMP or selling search services used to imprison chinese citizens. Google should be ashamed of itself. Would never take a job at a company like Alphabet. It conflicts with my sense of ethics and morality.
  - geofft 8y ago
    What is a "company like Alphabet"? Can any company of the size and scale of Alphabet, or aiming to be such one day, avoid these pressures? Why isn't this the Google we grew up with, given that this is what Google was growing up to be all along? A serious question is whether a young company in roughly the state Google was in the early '00s can reasonably commit to never becoming a multibillion-dollar conglomerate.
pradn 8y ago
Measuring load times and ranking sites that way produces a relative ordering of fast and relevant sites. (Slow sites can still do well if they're faster than other sites.) Making sites implement AMP absolutely ensures that the site is fast. Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on any AMP related stuff.

otabdeveloper1 8y ago

> AMP serves a critical strategic purpose: it severely disincentivizes visiting a non-Google branded site. Fixed it for ya. P.S. Google sucks balls.

dang 8y ago
Please don't do this here.

Jasper_ 8y ago

> AMP serves a critical strategic purpose: it severely disincentivizes crappy, JS-heavy websites on search results and as a result makes people less likely to install adblockers. The slowest, most resource-intensive web sites I visit are, in order: Slack, GMail, and Google Play Music. If Google wants others to take web performance seriously, they should start with their own internal stuff.

what_ever 8y ago
Are Slack, GMail, Google Play Music websites or web applications? AMP is not applicable to sites/applications that remain open in your tabs all the time. I think it's more applicable to pages you open, consume the information and close the tab in couple of minutes. Disc: Googler but nowhere close to AMP.
- Jasper_ 8y ago
  Let's say Google Maps then. It will show up in search results, artificially at the top because of close integration, but performs incredibly poorly. I can't take their claims about AMP being about performance seriously when they do not seem to make any attempt at optimizing the stuff that they put on top.
  - what_ever 8y ago
    Sorry missed this. I don't consider Google Maps a website as well. Specially not a static website that AMP is targetting. You move around in maps, give it input and it gives you a different output.