7 ms·

Exactly, use google amp and get higher rankings and it can increase your traffic by hundreds to thousands to millions. I hate it but its how it works

superkuh 7y ago
Higher rankings and google will preload the amp page they have and their servers for the amp link. That's why it is a tiny bit faster. It has nothing to do with the amp spec itself. It's faster because google is abusing it's monopoly search position to pre-load.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  > google is abusing it's monopoly search position to pre-load. How is that abusing their monopoly search position? Abusing their monopoly search position would be making publishers integrate directly with them to enable preload, like Apple News. Instead, they ask publishers to serve documents that can safely be prerendered, and all their competitors get to (and do!) consume those documents as well to enable safe prerendering from their own sites.
  - stephenr 7y ago
    Without their monopoly search position no one would be forced to adopt amp and further strengthen said monopoly position.
    - joshuamorton 7y ago
      How does amp strengthen a monopoly position?
      - stephenr 7y ago
        It strengthens googles control over the web.
        joshuamorton 7y ago
        In what way though? Like that's super generic and not particularly meaningful without a more concrete explanation.
        underdown 7y ago
        Traffic never leaving Google's servers seems pretty concrete.
        colejohnson66 7y ago
        You can self host AMP. It doesn’t have to be on google’s servers.
        stephenr 7y ago
        But the traffic coming from Google results will always view it from Google servers.
        TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
        No, there's nothing like super generic about it. Google has a de facto monopoly on site rankings, which gives it de facto editorial control over the content of the Internet down to a very fine level. If Google decides to drop a site from search, that site loses traffic and is effectively removed from visibility. This is not a user choice. Users do not to get to say "Well, that site is too slow for me, so I won't visit it again. And actually I don't like the content either." It's not a site owner choice. Owners can't respond to user preferences by improving performance or offering different content. It's a Google choice. And the reasons for Google's choices are typically opaque, largely unstated, and never negotiated directly with site owners. It's absolutely unacceptable for a single unaccountable corporation to have this level level of control over global information infrastructure. In fact the whole idea of generic but opaque site ranking is toxic to an open Internet, and always has been. The idea that page rank has some kind of objective user value - as opposed to monopoly value - has always been debatable. It was tolerable conceit in the days of Alta Vista when search was a research project, and some level of good faith was assumed. But Google has trashed that good faith by operating like a bad actor - and monopolist - in numerous ways, AMP being the most recent example. So no - not generic. Not even close.
      - RonanTheGrey 7y ago
        "Use AMP or your site will not be present in mobile search results" doesn't seem like monopolistic practices to you?
        joshuamorton 7y ago
        A priori not anymore so than otherwise downranking slow sites. The missing piece here is how using amp is beneficial to Google or harmful to consumers/other search engines to make it anticompetative.
        bscphil 7y ago
        > how using amp is beneficial to Google You are correct, most people are leaving this out. I think an emphasis on asking why Google is pushing AMP, and whether that interest aligns with consumers, would be helpful in this thread.
        stephenr 7y ago
        Most people seem to intrinsically understand that a single browser-making ad company dictating what features a website can or can not use is about that company flexing it's muscles to control things. Is that really not obvious to some?
        bscphil 7y ago
        > Most people seem to intrinsically understand that a single browser-making ad company dictating what features a website can or can not use is about that company flexing it's muscles to control things. But the point made up-thread was that "controlling things" is not intrinsically bad. The problem was that (according to some users) Google was abusing a monopoly position to control things in a way that would be beneficial to itself, but harmful to others. The question the parent to my comment was asking was, beneficial to itself how? You saying that Google is "controlling things" just takes us back to where we started, but doesn't answer the question of what Google stands to gain. Let me give an example. Suppose by "controlling things" you mean incentivizing ("""forcing""") web developers to create pages that are better because they have lighter scripts and higher security standards for third party content. (In fact, this is what some supporters say Google is doing.) I don't think most people would have a problem with that. So presumably critics have something interesting to say about what "controlling things" really means that explains why it's bad in this particular case.
      - dmitriid 7y ago
        In case joshuamorton forgets to disclose in a thread, he currently works at Google.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - lern_too_spel 7y ago
      > Without their monopoly search position no one would be forced to adopt amp It is used by the major search engines in every major market, so yes, they would be forced to adopt AMP. Compare to Apple News, which gives the publisher even less control. Once again, how is it abusing their monopoly position if all their competitors get to benefit from it for free? Finally, how do you propose to enable safe prerendering on the web that you would be fine with? RSS enables the same thing but takes even more control away from the publisher, but you're presumably fine with that. Not a single person in all these AMP rant articles that pollute HN has ever proposed an alternative, with 99% of the ranters, including this one, not even understanding the basic fact that prerendering is the thing that AMP enables.
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        I don’t want prerendering if it comes with this attached to it. Fast pages don’t need prerendering.
        lern_too_spel 7y ago
        Tell that to Apple, Facebook, and RSS aggregators, all of which do the same thing but worse. Whether or not you want it, I and apparently most other users do want it.
        saagarjha 7y ago
        As has been mentioned before, what Apple, Facebook, and RSS aggregators are doing is quite different than what Google is: they're not purporting to be search engines.
        lern_too_spel 7y ago
        And how is that any different? The end result is they're forcing publishers to use their format.
        7y ago
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Apple isn’t running a dominant search engine that upranks Apple News results.
    - lern_too_spel 7y ago
      You're right. Apple is worse. They show only Apple News results.
      - squiggleblaz 7y ago
        But there's a difference between having a service which only shows your stuff, and having a service which apparently shows the entire internet, but subtly prefers your stuff. Most people find the latter far more questionable than the former, because if we want to find anything, we need to know where to look.
        lern_too_spel 7y ago
        > but subtly prefers your stuff. It prefers instant loading pages because that's what users want. If not, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Yahoo, or any of the other search engines that also use AMP would simply rank differently to beat Google.
        carlhjerpe 7y ago
        The things that's being discussed though is that even if your page loads in "no time" AMP will be perfered anyways, even if your page loads fast enough that the user wont notice a difference.
        lern_too_spel 7y ago
        There is no fast enough that a user won't notice the difference between that and instant, especially due to RTT for the request. That's why I always click on results with the lightning icon, and that's what I figure enough other users do too in order for AMP pages to rank so highly. If that's not the case, the other search engines can rank differently to beat Google, as I said.
- shawnz 7y ago
  I think the idea is that preloading wouldn't be feasible with arbitrary unrestricted HTML because of security concerns, which is why they created this restricted subset in the first place.
earthboundkid 7y ago
Huh, weird, it's almost like they're abusing their search monopoly to push a technology that everyone hates and is only fast when compared to their ad monopoly.
- bscphil 7y ago
  > a technology that everyone hates There are users in this thread that seem to like it quite a lot because it's faster than the original site, because it limits the amount of crap the original site can run. The only reason I don't like AMP is because I don't like an intermediary like Google rendering pages for me and probably tracking what I do on them. That's ... not even close to something on most people's radars, so there's no way "everyone" hates it for that reason. I suspect most people have never heard of AMP and just like it when sites load fast.

superkuh 7y ago

Higher rankings and google will preload the amp page they have and their servers for the amp link. That's why it is a tiny bit faster. It has nothing to do with the amp spec itself. It's faster because google is abusing it's monopoly search position to pre-load.

lern_too_spel 7y ago
> google is abusing it's monopoly search position to pre-load. How is that abusing their monopoly search position? Abusing their monopoly search position would be making publishers integrate directly with them to enable preload, like Apple News. Instead, they ask publishers to serve documents that can safely be prerendered, and all their competitors get to (and do!) consume those documents as well to enable safe prerendering from their own sites.
- stephenr 7y ago
  Without their monopoly search position no one would be forced to adopt amp and further strengthen said monopoly position.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    How does amp strengthen a monopoly position?
    - stephenr 7y ago
      It strengthens googles control over the web.
      - joshuamorton 7y ago
        In what way though? Like that's super generic and not particularly meaningful without a more concrete explanation.
        underdown 7y ago
        Traffic never leaving Google's servers seems pretty concrete.
        colejohnson66 7y ago
        You can self host AMP. It doesn’t have to be on google’s servers.
        stephenr 7y ago
        But the traffic coming from Google results will always view it from Google servers.
        TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
        No, there's nothing like super generic about it. Google has a de facto monopoly on site rankings, which gives it de facto editorial control over the content of the Internet down to a very fine level. If Google decides to drop a site from search, that site loses traffic and is effectively removed from visibility. This is not a user choice. Users do not to get to say "Well, that site is too slow for me, so I won't visit it again. And actually I don't like the content either." It's not a site owner choice. Owners can't respond to user preferences by improving performance or offering different content. It's a Google choice. And the reasons for Google's choices are typically opaque, largely unstated, and never negotiated directly with site owners. It's absolutely unacceptable for a single unaccountable corporation to have this level level of control over global information infrastructure. In fact the whole idea of generic but opaque site ranking is toxic to an open Internet, and always has been. The idea that page rank has some kind of objective user value - as opposed to monopoly value - has always been debatable. It was tolerable conceit in the days of Alta Vista when search was a research project, and some level of good faith was assumed. But Google has trashed that good faith by operating like a bad actor - and monopolist - in numerous ways, AMP being the most recent example. So no - not generic. Not even close.
    - RonanTheGrey 7y ago
      "Use AMP or your site will not be present in mobile search results" doesn't seem like monopolistic practices to you?
      - joshuamorton 7y ago
        A priori not anymore so than otherwise downranking slow sites. The missing piece here is how using amp is beneficial to Google or harmful to consumers/other search engines to make it anticompetative.
        bscphil 7y ago
        > how using amp is beneficial to Google You are correct, most people are leaving this out. I think an emphasis on asking why Google is pushing AMP, and whether that interest aligns with consumers, would be helpful in this thread.
        stephenr 7y ago
        Most people seem to intrinsically understand that a single browser-making ad company dictating what features a website can or can not use is about that company flexing it's muscles to control things. Is that really not obvious to some?
        bscphil 7y ago
        > Most people seem to intrinsically understand that a single browser-making ad company dictating what features a website can or can not use is about that company flexing it's muscles to control things. But the point made up-thread was that "controlling things" is not intrinsically bad. The problem was that (according to some users) Google was abusing a monopoly position to control things in a way that would be beneficial to itself, but harmful to others. The question the parent to my comment was asking was, beneficial to itself how? You saying that Google is "controlling things" just takes us back to where we started, but doesn't answer the question of what Google stands to gain. Let me give an example. Suppose by "controlling things" you mean incentivizing ("""forcing""") web developers to create pages that are better because they have lighter scripts and higher security standards for third party content. (In fact, this is what some supporters say Google is doing.) I don't think most people would have a problem with that. So presumably critics have something interesting to say about what "controlling things" really means that explains why it's bad in this particular case.
    - dmitriid 7y ago
      In case joshuamorton forgets to disclose in a thread, he currently works at Google.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    > Without their monopoly search position no one would be forced to adopt amp It is used by the major search engines in every major market, so yes, they would be forced to adopt AMP. Compare to Apple News, which gives the publisher even less control. Once again, how is it abusing their monopoly position if all their competitors get to benefit from it for free? Finally, how do you propose to enable safe prerendering on the web that you would be fine with? RSS enables the same thing but takes even more control away from the publisher, but you're presumably fine with that. Not a single person in all these AMP rant articles that pollute HN has ever proposed an alternative, with 99% of the ranters, including this one, not even understanding the basic fact that prerendering is the thing that AMP enables.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      I don’t want prerendering if it comes with this attached to it. Fast pages don’t need prerendering.
      - lern_too_spel 7y ago
        Tell that to Apple, Facebook, and RSS aggregators, all of which do the same thing but worse. Whether or not you want it, I and apparently most other users do want it.
        saagarjha 7y ago
        As has been mentioned before, what Apple, Facebook, and RSS aggregators are doing is quite different than what Google is: they're not purporting to be search engines.
        lern_too_spel 7y ago
        And how is that any different? The end result is they're forcing publishers to use their format.
        7y ago
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Apple isn’t running a dominant search engine that upranks Apple News results.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    You're right. Apple is worse. They show only Apple News results.
    - squiggleblaz 7y ago
      But there's a difference between having a service which only shows your stuff, and having a service which apparently shows the entire internet, but subtly prefers your stuff. Most people find the latter far more questionable than the former, because if we want to find anything, we need to know where to look.
      - lern_too_spel 7y ago
        > but subtly prefers your stuff. It prefers instant loading pages because that's what users want. If not, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Yahoo, or any of the other search engines that also use AMP would simply rank differently to beat Google.
        carlhjerpe 7y ago
        The things that's being discussed though is that even if your page loads in "no time" AMP will be perfered anyways, even if your page loads fast enough that the user wont notice a difference.
        lern_too_spel 7y ago
        There is no fast enough that a user won't notice the difference between that and instant, especially due to RTT for the request. That's why I always click on results with the lightning icon, and that's what I figure enough other users do too in order for AMP pages to rank so highly. If that's not the case, the other search engines can rank differently to beat Google, as I said.
shawnz 7y ago
I think the idea is that preloading wouldn't be feasible with arbitrary unrestricted HTML because of security concerns, which is why they created this restricted subset in the first place.

earthboundkid 7y ago

Huh, weird, it's almost like they're abusing their search monopoly to push a technology that everyone hates and is only fast when compared to their ad monopoly.

bscphil 7y ago
> a technology that everyone hates There are users in this thread that seem to like it quite a lot because it's faster than the original site, because it limits the amount of crap the original site can run. The only reason I don't like AMP is because I don't like an intermediary like Google rendering pages for me and probably tracking what I do on them. That's ... not even close to something on most people's radars, so there's no way "everyone" hates it for that reason. I suspect most people have never heard of AMP and just like it when sites load fast.