28 ms·

Google Creates 'Dedicated Placement' in Search Results for AMP Stories

207 points by anfilt 7y ago

deogeo 7y ago
I'm looking forward to antitrust action being taken against Google due to trying to lock publishers into AMP.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  At this point, I suspect Google execs know it's inevitable, and figure the more lock-in they can build with standards now, before it happens, the harder it will be to meaningful strip Google's power.
  - est31 7y ago
    What do you mean? The government has managed to break up any monopoly since: Think of Standard oil or Bell corp.
    - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
      Computers are magic though.
      - h3ckr 7y ago
        The government cannot afford paying someone who actually understands computers. That someone would already be in Silicon Valley, not wanting to work for the government. Funny how things work
        finnthehuman 7y ago
        You've spent too long in the bubble. People outside of norcal can understand computers too. Many of them even work for the federal government outside of policy roles. Not everyone is looking to uproot their lives, move to a crowded, overpriced city and sell their soul to adtech, all for a few more dollars, ya know?
        dk- 7y ago
        I worked govt 10 years ago and this was 100% true then. Recently I made a (foolish) attempt to return to govt contracting and was shocked, SHOCKED, when they discussed Docker as a requirement and Kubernetes supported deployments as a nice-to-have.
- decasteve 7y ago
  I’m worried that antitrust action legitimizes Google as synonymous with the Internet. I’d rather see Google continue their race to the bottom and join the likes of CompuServe/AOL. It’s only a matter of time before competing services make Google irrelevant. It was hard to fathom 10-15 years ago that someone could come along and challenge them. Now as they take more and more measures like AMP it feels like it is ripe for someone to come along and make Google’s results feel like the new AltaVista/Yahoo in comparison. The Internet is vast and wide and the lens through Google/Twitter/Facebook, et al, which many see it is getting foggy. A time will come when we look back at this era and see it as the growing pains from the massive transition to a globally connected world.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
CoolGuySteve 7y ago
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
- yborg 7y ago
  Get monopoly power, do monopoly things.
mattkevan 7y ago
After switching to DDG few years ago, I used google search again for the first time in a while was surprised How bad their search has become. Not because it’s not good, it’s still better than DDG at certain things, but because the results have been crowded out by so much junk. There were so many ads, snippets, did you also means, and AMP widgets that there was only room for about eight actual search results. How have they let their core product get so lost?
- lettergram 7y ago
  Indeed! I too was slapped with this when I did a recent Google search. I had to wade through a ton of what I’d call “story cards” - I.e. a square around some story Google wanted to highlight. I couldn’t get to the actual results until half way down the page. Luckily, DuckDuckGo has been improving and now it’s even what I recommend to non-technical people; as I never use “!g” any more.
  - mattkevan 7y ago
    Really dislike those story cards. They get in the way of actual results, steal traffic from the sites the content is from and don’t deliver enough information to be useful. Not once has a story card provided what I needed.
- judge2020 7y ago
  Google realizes their biggest loss leader is directing customers off of their website to other websites, so the best way to turn a profit is to either keep users on the site (snippets, calculators[0], amp) or to send them to other sites for a price via ads. 0: https://goo.gl/search/right+rectangular+pyramid+calc:+find+A https://goo.gl/search/right+rectangular+pyramid+calc:+find+A
  - jostmey 7y ago
    Except that people will stop using google if it can’t help them find useful information. Google’s leadership seems to not understand or not care about how the internet works
tobr 7y ago
Shame on Venturebeat for reporting Googles’s messaging on this without as much as mentioning the criticism AMP has been met with, or how this makes it even more problematic.
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
I for the life of me don't understand how any Google AMP engineers can bother defending this anymore. A couple weeks ago there was an AMP article related to using real, source URLs, and a bunch of engineers from Google posted in defense. This is absolutely Google trying to dictate what the web should be. If the US had functional antitrust authorities they would kill this.
- rblatz 7y ago
  If anything got me to stop using google it would be amp, it’s such a trash experience. It makes me click multiple times and load the content multiple times before I can get to what I want.
- dmitriid 7y ago
  > I for the life of me don't understand how any Google AMP engineers can bother defending this anymore. The narrative is “we develop an open standard that is widely adopted, and we’re not responsible for what people do with it”. The team lead, @cramforce will also tell you tgat AMP is good for tge web.
  - stephenr 7y ago
    Maybe someone needs to tell @cramforce where to cram it, with force. Or, “fuck you very much” if you aren’t much on name based commentary.
    - dmitriid 7y ago
      He’ll just block you, and carry on.
    - dang 7y ago
      Please don't post like this to HN, regardless of whom you're attacking. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- pixxel 7y ago
  “I for the life of me don't understand how any Google AMP engineers can bother defending this anymore” Got to justify that google pay check. Mostly to themselves, helps to do it out loud.
lioeters 7y ago
As much as I'm often dismayed by the negativity on HN (or, let's say, brutal honesty: "this product is shit!") - harsh reactions are definitely warranted for cases like this anti-competitive behavior. Let's keep raising the stink, I hope the powers that be are paying attention. (Long-time DDG and Firefox user, doing my best to de-Google myself and my loved ones)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  Does Google make its own content which gets preferentially treated based on AMP, or why is this anticompetitive?
  - bduerst 7y ago
    It's not anticompetitive. It's a web standard that anyone can roll on their own domain (like amp.reddit.com), or host on a certified CDN (like Cloudflare) to get the icon in search results. Bing, Yandex, etc. can add icons or carousels in their results too if they wanted to.
    - vatueil 7y ago
      In fact, Bing does have a news carousel with AMP icons and their own AMP cache. Microsoft has long used AMP and their support is increasing: - https://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-the-amp-open-source-effort https://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-... - https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-Blog/September-2018/Introducing-Bing-AMP-viewer-and-Bing-AMP-cache https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-Blog/September-2018/Introdu... - https://www.bing.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2019/05/09/google-creates-dedicated-placement-in-search-results-for-amp-stories-starting-with-travel-category/amp/ https://www.bing.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2019/05/09/google... Microsoft is part of the AMP Project's governance as well, along with Cloudflare, Twitter, and other members: https://blog.amp.dev/2018/11/30/amp-projects-new-governance-model-now-in-effect/ https://blog.amp.dev/2018/11/30/amp-projects-new-governance-... I wouldn't be surprised if AMP starts appearing in other Bing search results, or if they start supporting links to AMP pages other than news articles in their carousels (which when you get down to it is basically all this announcement is about).
mises 7y ago
You know what I hate about google search possibly most of all? It doesn't list the actual URLs as hyperlinks. It lists part of them, and then has a google tracking URL as an actual link. Some times, I want to copy a URL without visiting it to use elsewhere. Sometimes, clicking it will cause the page to redirect, meaning I have to copy really quickly. I wish they would stop doing this. For reference, you have to right-click and go to "copy link location"; then paste, and you will see.
- lozenge 7y ago
  That is how they know which results are good and which send people straight back to the results page. And, it's going away thanks to the new "ping" HTML attribute.
  - mises 7y ago
    Yikes; I hadn't heard about this. Does uBlock origin stop this? I certainly don't want my browser doing it.
    - lozenge 7y ago
      I don't know, but how is it different from an onclick/onmouseover handler or a redirect uri from a privacy perspective?
    - rcxdude 7y ago
      Firefox doesn't have it enabled by default: you need to set a config variable for it to do anything.
  - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    "ping" died years ago, what are you talking about? https://stackoverflow.com/a/22434264/1075909 https://stackoverflow.com/a/22434264/1075909
    - lozenge 7y ago
      Chrome, Safari and Edge still support it - 87% according to caniuse.com
lwansbrough 7y ago
I hold the people developing this personally accountable for its negative impact on the web. Each developer’s role is just small enough so they feel powerless or don’t recognize the larger impact of their work. If you were paid to work on this, you are either wilfully ignorant or morally corrupt. Sure, this is only a small loss for the open web. But Google is a factory for small losses for the open web. I hope the pay is worth it!
- katzgrau 7y ago
  > If you were paid to work on this, you are either wilfully ignorant or morally corrupt. I'm not a fan of AMP, but this is way over the top.
  - blub 7y ago
    No, why would it be? All those people working for Facebook, Google all the other companies abusing our privacy are making a ton of money and we're all paying the costs. Why should we tolerate that? They are worthy of contempt.
    - jimmaswell 7y ago
      It's totally unreasonable to expect people to uproot their lives to protest web services that don't even honestly do anything that bad. Are you certain your company never does anything questionable? You better quit and go live on a commune just to be safe.
      - blub 7y ago
        If a company's expecting to be fined 5 billion dollars, it's pretty certain that it did something bad. And I don't think that one would have to uproot their lives, just quit and find another job. I hear there's a very strong market for FAANG engineers...
    - izacus 7y ago
      There are people on this very website who have vehemently defended software that decides whether some person needs to be killed with a missile from a drone. That have defended and encouraged companies like Google to help military kill foreigners, countrymen and countrywomen of many people visiting this site. And AMP, a restricted web standard, is that's "worth of contempt"? Please, please, take a step back and think of it for a moment.
mediocrejoker 7y ago
It would be great to see a concise, relatively non-technical introduction to what is AMP and why is it bad for the open web that I could send to friends and family.
- mthoms 7y ago
  If a bunch of developers got together to create a site and surrounding campaign it sure would be great. I'd be happy to help support it (through Patreon or something?). I'd even donate some labour if it were needed.
- joegahona 7y ago
  http://ampletter.org/ http://ampletter.org/
karl_gluck 7y ago
Well, here it is. This is the straw that broke the camel's back for me: I've finally been motivated to switch my browser default to Duck Duck Go.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  I made the same choice. This is exactly the type of behavior antitrust is supposed to prevent, and it's the same reasoning behind the Microsoft antitrust action in the late 90s: it's OK if you built up a monopoly because you had a superior product, but it is NOT OK to leverage that monopoly to dictate other areas of the marketplace. It would be OK if Google released AMP and everyone jumped on it because it was a great product. The only reason anyone uses it is because Google gives it prominent position in search results, and search position on Google is make or break for anyone publishing content on the web.
- rcchyssser 7y ago
  Good for you. Stop complaining and make a move.
mimixco 7y ago
Glad to see that HN'ers are seeing this for what it is: another Google idea that's sold as "benefitting users" when the only real beneficiary is Google's ad revenue and control over eyeballs. I'll echo the many here who report that, for everyday use, DDG is far preferable. I've only needed Google for arcane programming links or occasional news stories.
codedokode 7y ago
Slightly off-topic, but without "reading mode" that site is unreadable.
memo_ree 7y ago
Seriously, I just don't get these hateful comments on Hacker News regarding AMP. It helps websites load fast on mobile, and users really appreciate when websites load fast.
- ohashi 7y ago
  Based on your comment history it sounds like you work at Google. Does that put blinders on your opinion?
  - dictum 7y ago
    I share the same distrust about Facebook and Google on HN, but only the latter seems to bring substantial downvotes. To be fair, they have more employees, and I don't assume bad faith in the downvotes — I've been wrong more than a few times. Still, I sense that Google elicits a gratitude that is unjustified when it comes to relationships between companies, customers and employees.
- blackbrokkoli 7y ago
  Sure, you're not wrong. "This webpage works best in Our Browser™️" was just a pointer to the user for a faster experience. It came at the small cost of crippling the web for a mere 15 years, probably costing a few billion hours user time wasted at horrible UX bred in a hostile corporate controlled environment. AMP is just the same all over again, just with a singular player which might just be too big to fail. Oh, and also this time things like the information source of the western world is at stake, not only fan sites of specific locomotive models by some geeks. But at least my websites load....slower actually if the page was properly built[1]! [1]https://digiday.com/media/google-amp-beat-facebook-instant-articles-publishers-start-question-amps-benefits/ https://digiday.com/media/google-amp-beat-facebook-instant-a...
  - clairity 7y ago
    > "...just with a singular player which might just be too big to fail" while i agree with the overall sentiment that google is pulling a microsoft, i don't see how this line is true. if google went away tomorrow, how would it lead to an economic downturn? it would suck if you're all in on google in some way, but most of their products have competitors and substitutes, so you could switch. maybe android losing some core services that aren't immediately replaceable might cripple phones for some folks. the engineers could certainly find new jobs, and a bunch would go on to create new companies from the things they're working on now while soaking up all the idle wealth around the world looking for any return at all. i rarely use google for anything, so maybe i'm missing the obvious.
stephenr 7y ago
More AMP bullshit. But, as a pretty staunch anti-Google company, why does DDG send me to AMP links? Give me the ducking (autocorrect pun!) canonical URL!
- 333c 7y ago
  > why does DDG send me to AMP links? As a DDG user, I've never noticed this. Can you link an example?
  - stephenr 7y ago
    I couldn't find one last night when I saw your reply (of course) but I've been sent to some sites that were AMP. It's instantly obvious because I have a content blocker rule to block the AMP JS - so I get a blank white page for 8 seconds (because the AMP mandatory boilerplate specifies this, via CSS). I'll try to find an example and note down the site that it happens on.
founderling 7y ago
It seems like Google thinks of the web as "their thing". Just like Facebook owns Facebook and Amazon owns Amazon, it seems Google wants to own the web and turn it into Google. Amp pages are similar to a Page on Facebook or an Article on Amazon. The author is limited to what the platform allows. And the visitors stay on the platform. I wonder how that will turn out for Google. I wonder how that will turn out for the web.
superasn 7y ago
Why doesn't Google treat all websites that load under 100ms at par with an AMP site? They keep using the ruse that AMP is important because it is all about fast loading sites and less frustrating user experience but they have page speed insights, and already rank sites based on load speed so why force this non standard on everyone? If they just said we'll give you a bolt icon and the perks for a site that loads under X ms no matter how you do it (AMP or anything else) a lot of people will welcome it.
- masklinn 7y ago
  > Why doesn't Google treat all websites that load under 100ms at par with an AMP site? Because then it wouldn't be a wedge anymore.
- HALtheWise 7y ago
  Basically, because it isn't actually possible to make a website that loads in under 100ms on poor connections any other way. For reference, on the fast university wifi I am currently connected to, news.ycombinator.com loads in 499ms. When I switch to my phone's hotspot, that rises to 2.38 seconds, and on a simulated slow 3G network, that rises to 6.51 seconds. I haven't tested a 2G connection in India, but wouldn't be surprised if it exceeds 10 seconds. Hacker News is not a heavy webpage, in fact, it is probably about as lightweight a webpage as is reasonably possible to create. The key technique that AMP promises will beat the limits of network latency is precaching. Unfortunately, users have a strong privacy expectation that random websites will not be notified that you are interested in them until you actually click the link in search results (or news, or whatever). For precaching to work without violating user privacy, the data needs to be loaded from some server that already knows that the link was shown to you, so there is no privacy violation from giving it that information. AMP's solution is for the host company of the results page to fill that role. The AMP lightning bolt is intended to mean "this page is already downloaded offline on your device, and so will load instantly", not just "this page is well-designed and fast". The difference is minor for blazing fast connections, but that isn't true for developing world users with weak connections and devices. Google has said that when open web standards like Web Packaging finally show up which enable the same safe preloading behavior, those sites will be included in AMP carousels. We'll see whether they follow through with that. [1] [2] * All experiments conducted with cache disabled, times are until Load event fires. [1] https://blog.amp.dev/2018/03/08/standardizing-lessons-learned-from-amp/ https://blog.amp.dev/2018/03/08/standardizing-lessons-learne... [2] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/contributing/web-standards-related-to-amp.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/contributi...
pxtail 7y ago
I think that all of this: AMP, AMP Stories, mini apps[0] and recently announced Portals is a road to create behavior and ecosystem similar to WeChat where user can do as many things as possible without leaving the app. The problem is that google doesn't have popular chat app, but hey... they have incredibly popular search engine.. [0] https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/08/googles-mini-apps-are-app-like-experiences-for-search-and-google-assistant/ https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/08/googles-mini-apps-are-app...
- v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
  Partly yes. The end goal is most likely to merge everything. An assistant led ambient web. Completely device- and platform-agnostic. Domains and source of information will move to the background and fluid visual and voice information will appear where and when it‘s requested or guessed. Further away I can see devices completely disappearing. Surfaces of all kinds, contact lenses serve as information overlays. Eventually the physical world and that information layer might become indistinguishable and just sort of combine to create the new reality. /complete guesswork
ben_jones 7y ago
I just want Google to acknowledge WHY they do stuff like this instead of an incompetent attempt to distract users with WHAT or HOW. AMP is clearly designed to keep internet users within Google's membrane because the default AMP cache most people are hitting is Google's. Sure, its faster then many types of websites but that is only a side affect of the system not its primary purpose or feature. Google execs are not excited or bullish about AMP because of performance gains. Talk about the real reasons if you want to have integrity.
- calibas 7y ago
  They do it to make money, but being that honest makes them sound like an amoral entity motivated almost solely by greed (which they are).
jacquesm 7y ago
You can't really build anything just for the good of the world and not expect that sooner or later the corporate vultures will swoop in to take over. Google is rapidly becoming a cancer on the web, and I sincerely hope that these monopolist tendencies will end up being smashed to bits by the regulatory hammer.
rcchyssser 7y ago
STFU and use another search engine. Google is a business and they offer a product.
thinkingemote 7y ago
I'm happily contrarian. can anyone state a positive spin on this story?
anfilt 7y ago
This also makes it more obvious why google is trying to create this new portal tag. They don't won't people leaving google at all. Link to discussion on the proposed portal tag. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19866584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19866584
- anfilt 7y ago
  Can't edit any more, but it's not even a guess any more. https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/contributing/web-standards-related-to-amp.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/contributi...
sergiotapia 7y ago
Damn Google you are nasty and getting nastier every day. Flutter is yet another wedge you are trying to sneak into developers toolkits, although I don't think it's going to catch on. Developers are becoming wise to what's at stake.
pcmaffey 7y ago
I’m considering adding a popup to ?amp=1 visitors that educates/warns them that google is hijacking their browsing experience.
JoshMnem 7y ago
The open WWW is one of the greatest things that humans have achieved, and Google is in the process of destroying it. It looks like the goal is to replace the Web with their own product where ads and tracking can't be blocked, and fewer people leave Google's servers. This new replacement for the Web will only fully work in Google Chrome, because Google is abandoning true web standards with things like AMP and Portals. (Being forced to include Google's JavaScript in your web pages under threat of losing your traffic is not a real web standard.) The bulk of what is published online will have Google's visual branding (Material Design), and you might never leave Google's servers (as a user) or be able to fully control your own tech stack (as a publisher). AMP is a vicious attack on the open Web and a completely unethical power grab. This is why one company shouldn't control the browser, the search engine, and the operating system at the same time.

207 points by anfilt 7y ago

deogeo 7y ago

I'm looking forward to antitrust action being taken against Google due to trying to lock publishers into AMP.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
At this point, I suspect Google execs know it's inevitable, and figure the more lock-in they can build with standards now, before it happens, the harder it will be to meaningful strip Google's power.
- est31 7y ago
  What do you mean? The government has managed to break up any monopoly since: Think of Standard oil or Bell corp.
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    Computers are magic though.
    - h3ckr 7y ago
      The government cannot afford paying someone who actually understands computers. That someone would already be in Silicon Valley, not wanting to work for the government. Funny how things work
      - finnthehuman 7y ago
        You've spent too long in the bubble. People outside of norcal can understand computers too. Many of them even work for the federal government outside of policy roles. Not everyone is looking to uproot their lives, move to a crowded, overpriced city and sell their soul to adtech, all for a few more dollars, ya know?
        dk- 7y ago
        I worked govt 10 years ago and this was 100% true then. Recently I made a (foolish) attempt to return to govt contracting and was shocked, SHOCKED, when they discussed Docker as a requirement and Kubernetes supported deployments as a nice-to-have.
decasteve 7y ago
I’m worried that antitrust action legitimizes Google as synonymous with the Internet. I’d rather see Google continue their race to the bottom and join the likes of CompuServe/AOL. It’s only a matter of time before competing services make Google irrelevant. It was hard to fathom 10-15 years ago that someone could come along and challenge them. Now as they take more and more measures like AMP it feels like it is ripe for someone to come along and make Google’s results feel like the new AltaVista/Yahoo in comparison. The Internet is vast and wide and the lens through Google/Twitter/Facebook, et al, which many see it is getting foggy. A time will come when we look back at this era and see it as the growing pains from the massive transition to a globally connected world.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

CoolGuySteve 7y ago

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

yborg 7y ago
Get monopoly power, do monopoly things.

mattkevan 7y ago

After switching to DDG few years ago, I used google search again for the first time in a while was surprised How bad their search has become. Not because it’s not good, it’s still better than DDG at certain things, but because the results have been crowded out by so much junk. There were so many ads, snippets, did you also means, and AMP widgets that there was only room for about eight actual search results. How have they let their core product get so lost?

lettergram 7y ago
Indeed! I too was slapped with this when I did a recent Google search. I had to wade through a ton of what I’d call “story cards” - I.e. a square around some story Google wanted to highlight. I couldn’t get to the actual results until half way down the page. Luckily, DuckDuckGo has been improving and now it’s even what I recommend to non-technical people; as I never use “!g” any more.
- mattkevan 7y ago
  Really dislike those story cards. They get in the way of actual results, steal traffic from the sites the content is from and don’t deliver enough information to be useful. Not once has a story card provided what I needed.
judge2020 7y ago
Google realizes their biggest loss leader is directing customers off of their website to other websites, so the best way to turn a profit is to either keep users on the site (snippets, calculators[0], amp) or to send them to other sites for a price via ads. 0: https://goo.gl/search/right+rectangular+pyramid+calc:+find+A https://goo.gl/search/right+rectangular+pyramid+calc:+find+A
- jostmey 7y ago
  Except that people will stop using google if it can’t help them find useful information. Google’s leadership seems to not understand or not care about how the internet works

tobr 7y ago

Shame on Venturebeat for reporting Googles’s messaging on this without as much as mentioning the criticism AMP has been met with, or how this makes it even more problematic.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

I for the life of me don't understand how any Google AMP engineers can bother defending this anymore. A couple weeks ago there was an AMP article related to using real, source URLs, and a bunch of engineers from Google posted in defense. This is absolutely Google trying to dictate what the web should be. If the US had functional antitrust authorities they would kill this.

rblatz 7y ago
If anything got me to stop using google it would be amp, it’s such a trash experience. It makes me click multiple times and load the content multiple times before I can get to what I want.
dmitriid 7y ago
> I for the life of me don't understand how any Google AMP engineers can bother defending this anymore. The narrative is “we develop an open standard that is widely adopted, and we’re not responsible for what people do with it”. The team lead, @cramforce will also tell you tgat AMP is good for tge web.
- stephenr 7y ago
  Maybe someone needs to tell @cramforce where to cram it, with force. Or, “fuck you very much” if you aren’t much on name based commentary.
  - dmitriid 7y ago
    He’ll just block you, and carry on.
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't post like this to HN, regardless of whom you're attacking. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
pixxel 7y ago
“I for the life of me don't understand how any Google AMP engineers can bother defending this anymore” Got to justify that google pay check. Mostly to themselves, helps to do it out loud.

lioeters 7y ago

As much as I'm often dismayed by the negativity on HN (or, let's say, brutal honesty: "this product is shit!") - harsh reactions are definitely warranted for cases like this anti-competitive behavior. Let's keep raising the stink, I hope the powers that be are paying attention. (Long-time DDG and Firefox user, doing my best to de-Google myself and my loved ones)

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jimmaswell 7y ago
Does Google make its own content which gets preferentially treated based on AMP, or why is this anticompetitive?
- bduerst 7y ago
  It's not anticompetitive. It's a web standard that anyone can roll on their own domain (like amp.reddit.com), or host on a certified CDN (like Cloudflare) to get the icon in search results. Bing, Yandex, etc. can add icons or carousels in their results too if they wanted to.
  - vatueil 7y ago
    In fact, Bing does have a news carousel with AMP icons and their own AMP cache. Microsoft has long used AMP and their support is increasing: - https://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-the-amp-open-source-effort https://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-... - https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-Blog/September-2018/Introducing-Bing-AMP-viewer-and-Bing-AMP-cache https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-Blog/September-2018/Introdu... - https://www.bing.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2019/05/09/google-creates-dedicated-placement-in-search-results-for-amp-stories-starting-with-travel-category/amp/ https://www.bing.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2019/05/09/google... Microsoft is part of the AMP Project's governance as well, along with Cloudflare, Twitter, and other members: https://blog.amp.dev/2018/11/30/amp-projects-new-governance-model-now-in-effect/ https://blog.amp.dev/2018/11/30/amp-projects-new-governance-... I wouldn't be surprised if AMP starts appearing in other Bing search results, or if they start supporting links to AMP pages other than news articles in their carousels (which when you get down to it is basically all this announcement is about).

mises 7y ago

You know what I hate about google search possibly most of all? It doesn't list the actual URLs as hyperlinks. It lists part of them, and then has a google tracking URL as an actual link. Some times, I want to copy a URL without visiting it to use elsewhere. Sometimes, clicking it will cause the page to redirect, meaning I have to copy really quickly. I wish they would stop doing this. For reference, you have to right-click and go to "copy link location"; then paste, and you will see.

lozenge 7y ago
That is how they know which results are good and which send people straight back to the results page. And, it's going away thanks to the new "ping" HTML attribute.
- mises 7y ago
  Yikes; I hadn't heard about this. Does uBlock origin stop this? I certainly don't want my browser doing it.
  - lozenge 7y ago
    I don't know, but how is it different from an onclick/onmouseover handler or a redirect uri from a privacy perspective?
  - rcxdude 7y ago
    Firefox doesn't have it enabled by default: you need to set a config variable for it to do anything.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  "ping" died years ago, what are you talking about? https://stackoverflow.com/a/22434264/1075909 https://stackoverflow.com/a/22434264/1075909
  - lozenge 7y ago
    Chrome, Safari and Edge still support it - 87% according to caniuse.com

lwansbrough 7y ago

I hold the people developing this personally accountable for its negative impact on the web. Each developer’s role is just small enough so they feel powerless or don’t recognize the larger impact of their work. If you were paid to work on this, you are either wilfully ignorant or morally corrupt. Sure, this is only a small loss for the open web. But Google is a factory for small losses for the open web. I hope the pay is worth it!

katzgrau 7y ago
> If you were paid to work on this, you are either wilfully ignorant or morally corrupt. I'm not a fan of AMP, but this is way over the top.
- blub 7y ago
  No, why would it be? All those people working for Facebook, Google all the other companies abusing our privacy are making a ton of money and we're all paying the costs. Why should we tolerate that? They are worthy of contempt.
  - jimmaswell 7y ago
    It's totally unreasonable to expect people to uproot their lives to protest web services that don't even honestly do anything that bad. Are you certain your company never does anything questionable? You better quit and go live on a commune just to be safe.
    - blub 7y ago
      If a company's expecting to be fined 5 billion dollars, it's pretty certain that it did something bad. And I don't think that one would have to uproot their lives, just quit and find another job. I hear there's a very strong market for FAANG engineers...
  - izacus 7y ago
    There are people on this very website who have vehemently defended software that decides whether some person needs to be killed with a missile from a drone. That have defended and encouraged companies like Google to help military kill foreigners, countrymen and countrywomen of many people visiting this site. And AMP, a restricted web standard, is that's "worth of contempt"? Please, please, take a step back and think of it for a moment.

mediocrejoker 7y ago

It would be great to see a concise, relatively non-technical introduction to what is AMP and why is it bad for the open web that I could send to friends and family.

mthoms 7y ago
If a bunch of developers got together to create a site and surrounding campaign it sure would be great. I'd be happy to help support it (through Patreon or something?). I'd even donate some labour if it were needed.
joegahona 7y ago
http://ampletter.org/ http://ampletter.org/

karl_gluck 7y ago

Well, here it is. This is the straw that broke the camel's back for me: I've finally been motivated to switch my browser default to Duck Duck Go.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
I made the same choice. This is exactly the type of behavior antitrust is supposed to prevent, and it's the same reasoning behind the Microsoft antitrust action in the late 90s: it's OK if you built up a monopoly because you had a superior product, but it is NOT OK to leverage that monopoly to dictate other areas of the marketplace. It would be OK if Google released AMP and everyone jumped on it because it was a great product. The only reason anyone uses it is because Google gives it prominent position in search results, and search position on Google is make or break for anyone publishing content on the web.
rcchyssser 7y ago
Good for you. Stop complaining and make a move.

mimixco 7y ago

Glad to see that HN'ers are seeing this for what it is: another Google idea that's sold as "benefitting users" when the only real beneficiary is Google's ad revenue and control over eyeballs. I'll echo the many here who report that, for everyday use, DDG is far preferable. I've only needed Google for arcane programming links or occasional news stories.

codedokode 7y ago

Slightly off-topic, but without "reading mode" that site is unreadable.

memo_ree 7y ago

Seriously, I just don't get these hateful comments on Hacker News regarding AMP. It helps websites load fast on mobile, and users really appreciate when websites load fast.

ohashi 7y ago
Based on your comment history it sounds like you work at Google. Does that put blinders on your opinion?
- dictum 7y ago
  I share the same distrust about Facebook and Google on HN, but only the latter seems to bring substantial downvotes. To be fair, they have more employees, and I don't assume bad faith in the downvotes — I've been wrong more than a few times. Still, I sense that Google elicits a gratitude that is unjustified when it comes to relationships between companies, customers and employees.
blackbrokkoli 7y ago
Sure, you're not wrong. "This webpage works best in Our Browser™️" was just a pointer to the user for a faster experience. It came at the small cost of crippling the web for a mere 15 years, probably costing a few billion hours user time wasted at horrible UX bred in a hostile corporate controlled environment. AMP is just the same all over again, just with a singular player which might just be too big to fail. Oh, and also this time things like the information source of the western world is at stake, not only fan sites of specific locomotive models by some geeks. But at least my websites load....slower actually if the page was properly built[1]! [1]https://digiday.com/media/google-amp-beat-facebook-instant-articles-publishers-start-question-amps-benefits/ https://digiday.com/media/google-amp-beat-facebook-instant-a...
- clairity 7y ago
  > "...just with a singular player which might just be too big to fail" while i agree with the overall sentiment that google is pulling a microsoft, i don't see how this line is true. if google went away tomorrow, how would it lead to an economic downturn? it would suck if you're all in on google in some way, but most of their products have competitors and substitutes, so you could switch. maybe android losing some core services that aren't immediately replaceable might cripple phones for some folks. the engineers could certainly find new jobs, and a bunch would go on to create new companies from the things they're working on now while soaking up all the idle wealth around the world looking for any return at all. i rarely use google for anything, so maybe i'm missing the obvious.

stephenr 7y ago

More AMP bullshit. But, as a pretty staunch anti-Google company, why does DDG send me to AMP links? Give me the ducking (autocorrect pun!) canonical URL!

333c 7y ago
> why does DDG send me to AMP links? As a DDG user, I've never noticed this. Can you link an example?
- stephenr 7y ago
  I couldn't find one last night when I saw your reply (of course) but I've been sent to some sites that were AMP. It's instantly obvious because I have a content blocker rule to block the AMP JS - so I get a blank white page for 8 seconds (because the AMP mandatory boilerplate specifies this, via CSS). I'll try to find an example and note down the site that it happens on.

founderling 7y ago

It seems like Google thinks of the web as "their thing". Just like Facebook owns Facebook and Amazon owns Amazon, it seems Google wants to own the web and turn it into Google. Amp pages are similar to a Page on Facebook or an Article on Amazon. The author is limited to what the platform allows. And the visitors stay on the platform. I wonder how that will turn out for Google. I wonder how that will turn out for the web.

superasn 7y ago

Why doesn't Google treat all websites that load under 100ms at par with an AMP site? They keep using the ruse that AMP is important because it is all about fast loading sites and less frustrating user experience but they have page speed insights, and already rank sites based on load speed so why force this non standard on everyone? If they just said we'll give you a bolt icon and the perks for a site that loads under X ms no matter how you do it (AMP or anything else) a lot of people will welcome it.

masklinn 7y ago
> Why doesn't Google treat all websites that load under 100ms at par with an AMP site? Because then it wouldn't be a wedge anymore.
HALtheWise 7y ago
Basically, because it isn't actually possible to make a website that loads in under 100ms on poor connections any other way. For reference, on the fast university wifi I am currently connected to, news.ycombinator.com loads in 499ms. When I switch to my phone's hotspot, that rises to 2.38 seconds, and on a simulated slow 3G network, that rises to 6.51 seconds. I haven't tested a 2G connection in India, but wouldn't be surprised if it exceeds 10 seconds. Hacker News is not a heavy webpage, in fact, it is probably about as lightweight a webpage as is reasonably possible to create. The key technique that AMP promises will beat the limits of network latency is precaching. Unfortunately, users have a strong privacy expectation that random websites will not be notified that you are interested in them until you actually click the link in search results (or news, or whatever). For precaching to work without violating user privacy, the data needs to be loaded from some server that already knows that the link was shown to you, so there is no privacy violation from giving it that information. AMP's solution is for the host company of the results page to fill that role. The AMP lightning bolt is intended to mean "this page is already downloaded offline on your device, and so will load instantly", not just "this page is well-designed and fast". The difference is minor for blazing fast connections, but that isn't true for developing world users with weak connections and devices. Google has said that when open web standards like Web Packaging finally show up which enable the same safe preloading behavior, those sites will be included in AMP carousels. We'll see whether they follow through with that. [1] [2] * All experiments conducted with cache disabled, times are until Load event fires. [1] https://blog.amp.dev/2018/03/08/standardizing-lessons-learned-from-amp/ https://blog.amp.dev/2018/03/08/standardizing-lessons-learne... [2] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/contributing/web-standards-related-to-amp.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/contributi...

pxtail 7y ago

I think that all of this: AMP, AMP Stories, mini apps[0] and recently announced Portals is a road to create behavior and ecosystem similar to WeChat where user can do as many things as possible without leaving the app. The problem is that google doesn't have popular chat app, but hey... they have incredibly popular search engine.. [0] https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/08/googles-mini-apps-are-app-like-experiences-for-search-and-google-assistant/ https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/08/googles-mini-apps-are-app...

v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
Partly yes. The end goal is most likely to merge everything. An assistant led ambient web. Completely device- and platform-agnostic. Domains and source of information will move to the background and fluid visual and voice information will appear where and when it‘s requested or guessed. Further away I can see devices completely disappearing. Surfaces of all kinds, contact lenses serve as information overlays. Eventually the physical world and that information layer might become indistinguishable and just sort of combine to create the new reality. /complete guesswork

ben_jones 7y ago

I just want Google to acknowledge WHY they do stuff like this instead of an incompetent attempt to distract users with WHAT or HOW. AMP is clearly designed to keep internet users within Google's membrane because the default AMP cache most people are hitting is Google's. Sure, its faster then many types of websites but that is only a side affect of the system not its primary purpose or feature. Google execs are not excited or bullish about AMP because of performance gains. Talk about the real reasons if you want to have integrity.

calibas 7y ago
They do it to make money, but being that honest makes them sound like an amoral entity motivated almost solely by greed (which they are).

jacquesm 7y ago

You can't really build anything just for the good of the world and not expect that sooner or later the corporate vultures will swoop in to take over. Google is rapidly becoming a cancer on the web, and I sincerely hope that these monopolist tendencies will end up being smashed to bits by the regulatory hammer.

rcchyssser 7y ago

STFU and use another search engine. Google is a business and they offer a product.

thinkingemote 7y ago

I'm happily contrarian. can anyone state a positive spin on this story?

anfilt 7y ago

This also makes it more obvious why google is trying to create this new portal tag. They don't won't people leaving google at all. Link to discussion on the proposed portal tag. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19866584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19866584

anfilt 7y ago
Can't edit any more, but it's not even a guess any more. https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/contributing/web-standards-related-to-amp.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/contributi...

sergiotapia 7y ago

Damn Google you are nasty and getting nastier every day. Flutter is yet another wedge you are trying to sneak into developers toolkits, although I don't think it's going to catch on. Developers are becoming wise to what's at stake.

pcmaffey 7y ago

I’m considering adding a popup to ?amp=1 visitors that educates/warns them that google is hijacking their browsing experience.

JoshMnem 7y ago

The open WWW is one of the greatest things that humans have achieved, and Google is in the process of destroying it. It looks like the goal is to replace the Web with their own product where ads and tracking can't be blocked, and fewer people leave Google's servers. This new replacement for the Web will only fully work in Google Chrome, because Google is abandoning true web standards with things like AMP and Portals. (Being forced to include Google's JavaScript in your web pages under threat of losing your traffic is not a real web standard.) The bulk of what is published online will have Google's visual branding (Material Design), and you might never leave Google's servers (as a user) or be able to fully control your own tech stack (as a publisher). AMP is a vicious attack on the open Web and a completely unethical power grab. This is why one company shouldn't control the browser, the search engine, and the operating system at the same time.