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I think Core Web Vitals were incorporated into their approach to prepare for the retirement of AMP. Pushing publishers towards industry-wide best practices is a

I think Core Web Vitals were incorporated into their approach to prepare for the retirement of AMP. Pushing publishers towards industry-wide best practices is a good thing. Forcing AMP as a solution really wasn't.

ProAm 6y ago
It's not Googles job to push 'industry wide-best practices' to third parties.
- Spivak 6y ago
  True but it is in their interest. Google benefits when the web is fast and full of content that can be indexed and worth surfacing.
- _jal 6y ago
  It is their job to turn their power in to money, and AMP is just a power play. It is what tech companies do - if we don't like it, something about the fundamentals has to change. My only complaint is the smirky, chipper PR front they package with it. Microsoft, at least, wasn't too insecure to show some fang without the Candyland faux-earnest horse shit when they were king.
- oblio 6y ago
  It looks like it's no one's job, though. And the incentives for those third parties are even worse aligned with user interests, in many cases, than Google's incentives. And I say this as someone that thinks that Google is the scariest company out there, right now.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  It's not their job, but it's certainly in their interest (since it gives their users a better experience), and it's not illegal, so it's understandable that they do.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > It's not Googles job to push 'industry wide-best practices' to third parties. It's absolutely Google’s job to decide what quality signals to incorporate into their search rankings.
  - ProAm 6y ago
    Id argue its their job to index the internet, not dictate how people build their webpages to determine the order they are displayed. They want their crawler to be faster and to capture market share/screen time.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      When Microsoft was the dominant OS, they enabled ever-harder-to-ignore auto updates because without them, deployments of their OS could be used to harm other people's systems through remote attack exploits. Google is also at a scale where they can improve the quality of everyone's web experience with their scale. It' not so much "their job" as "their obligation."
      - ProAm 6y ago
        I completely disagree. Its my website, my servers, my bandwidth I pay for. Google has zero obligation to dictate how others go about creating their own product. They can enforce web standards sure, but AMP is horrific, and Im sure they next-gen AMP will also be counter productive to third parties.
        shadowgovt 6y ago
        By that reasoning: it's their search engine, their crawlers, their business to route people to the websites likeliest to be useful to those users. In that sense, their approach is in some way more equitable than Microsoft's: they're not forcing change upon your system by way of mandatory updates, they're simply saying that if you don't play the same game they play, they're unwilling to do business with you. If you're free to maintain your server to your standards, why should they not be free to maintain their search service to their standards?
untog 6y ago
It sounds like AMP will stick around, serving as the easiest way to guarantee a great Core Vitals score (because it's so locked down), but that you're welcome to find other ways to get a great score yourself. Which is how it should have always been.
mumblemumble 6y ago
I'm not super happy with the Web Vitals, either. They seem to be pushing the Web toward deploying a lot of otherwise-unnecessary JavaScript cleverness that ultimately presents itself to me in the form of a generally more obnoxious experience. Older and non-Chrome browsers may have difficulty rendering it. Total bandwidth consumption can go up, because it's A-OK to load a bunch of enormous resources later, just as long as it doesn't happen on initial page load, or take longer than 4 seconds to happen, as measured by the company with the fastest Internet connection in the world. Long story short, I don't see it as best practices that serve Internet users as a whole. They seem to be more closely tailored to the interests of Google. And, by extension, the subset of netizens from which they can generate the most revenue.
- TonyTrapp 6y ago
  I just looked into the search console for the first time in forever, and I'm not sure how Core Web Vitals would be pushing for unnecessary JavaScript. A website consisting of 100% static content seems to be fully okay according to their metrics - but funnily enough, some months ago they claimed that 50% of the pages were served too slowly on computers, while 100% of pages were OK on mobile. Same static server. Now it's the other way around, they randomly say that a random selection of pages is too slow on mobile, and it changes every day. Maybe it's just their own connection that sucks? It also doesn't help that they keep using acronyms for the broken stuff that aren't explained everywhere on the page itself.
  - lukebennett 6y ago
    Whilst there is an element of lab measurement involved, they do use field measurement, so metrics are collated from users rather than their own connection. This means that your data could just as easily be skewed by a browser/OS update that rolls out to a ton of devices at once, as much as anything at your end. Do agree that the proliferation of acronyms doesn't help with wrapping your head around it all!
  - mumblemumble 6y ago
    It's how the combination of the three encourages you to do things if you want to have a site with rich content. You're supposed to paint the page ASAP, so you don't want to defer loading any large content, but then you're not supposed to have the page layout shift around at all as you dynamically load all that content later, so you've got to do clever things with placeholders and swapping out content and whatnot. You've got up to 4 seconds to load all that stuff, which is enough to load an enormous amount of data over a fast internet connection, so much so that the same amount of content might take minutes to load over a slower connection. Fortunately, they've chosen methods for measuring that metric that are heavily biased toward measuring the experience of people who have 24/7 access to broadband. So, yeah, Google may want to encourage a nice Web experience, but they don't want to back this with metrics that might discourage people from sending too much business in AdSense's direction, or fail to favor Chrome over alternative browsers.
mtgx 6y ago
Were they? It seems that Google's Pagespeed Insights, which is the basis for Core Web Vitals, by default considers content paint performance to be (a very arbitrary) 4x slower on mobile than on desktop. https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/speed/get-started https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/spee... That to me seems like a pretty naked attempt to get everyone to "just use AMP for mobile."
stefan_ 6y ago
Is showing full screen images on desktop an industry-wide best practice? How about the faux navigation bars meant to resemble browser chrome? This "Google was just forcing publishers to fix their pages" meme desperately needs to die. Just consider all the extra standards crap they were pushing to introduce to perfect the deception. This was, as always, about owning the data.
- s17n 6y ago
  Except... they didn't own the data? AMP was conceived because Google was worried about everything moving into Facebook's walled garden. That's what it was competing against. Google doesn't need to own the data because Google is the world's gateway to the open web. They don't care who owns the data as long as they can crawl it.
achairapart 6y ago
To me AMP was just Google trying to turn the web itself in its own walled garden (after many failed social media attempts). And, as I read in the article, it looks like behind this move there is some current "Antitrust Pressure" plus publishers quite pissed off about losing both control and revenue themselves (as much as 39% less conversions, they says.). Clearly AMP was way more in Google master plans than a poor web performance palliative. [Edit] This was the article linked to this story when I commented (now changed to some Google Dev docs): https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/11/19/as-antitrust-pressure-mounts-google-to-pull-back-benefit-to-news-sites-that-adopted-its-preferred-mobile-technology https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/11/19/as-antitru...
- ehsankia 6y ago
  I never saw any convincing argument that AMP helped pushed a walled garden, at least not in any common accepted sense of that term. It was open source, it was used by many others including competitors, it was optional and it didn't block access from anyone. Having an AMP version in no way "locked" you to any garden, AMP versions aren't even meant to be the canonical page anyways. It may have had a lot of issues, but "walled garden" would not be one of them.
  - pushrax 6y ago
    I always viewed AMP as being primarily for Google’s data collection interests, not primarily lock-in.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    The carousel setup it enabled was certainly a (soft) walled garden. It hijacked the top portion of a publisher's page, the back button, and swipe actions, resulting in more time spent on Google.
  - achairapart 6y ago
    All of the antitrust case is about how Google pushed its user searches to its own proprieties. And it was as optional as publishers were almost forced to jump in it to stay relevant in News SEO.

ProAm 6y ago

It's not Googles job to push 'industry wide-best practices' to third parties.

Spivak 6y ago
True but it is in their interest. Google benefits when the web is fast and full of content that can be indexed and worth surfacing.
_jal 6y ago
It is their job to turn their power in to money, and AMP is just a power play. It is what tech companies do - if we don't like it, something about the fundamentals has to change. My only complaint is the smirky, chipper PR front they package with it. Microsoft, at least, wasn't too insecure to show some fang without the Candyland faux-earnest horse shit when they were king.
oblio 6y ago
It looks like it's no one's job, though. And the incentives for those third parties are even worse aligned with user interests, in many cases, than Google's incentives. And I say this as someone that thinks that Google is the scariest company out there, right now.
asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
It's not their job, but it's certainly in their interest (since it gives their users a better experience), and it's not illegal, so it's understandable that they do.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> It's not Googles job to push 'industry wide-best practices' to third parties. It's absolutely Google’s job to decide what quality signals to incorporate into their search rankings.
- ProAm 6y ago
  Id argue its their job to index the internet, not dictate how people build their webpages to determine the order they are displayed. They want their crawler to be faster and to capture market share/screen time.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    When Microsoft was the dominant OS, they enabled ever-harder-to-ignore auto updates because without them, deployments of their OS could be used to harm other people's systems through remote attack exploits. Google is also at a scale where they can improve the quality of everyone's web experience with their scale. It' not so much "their job" as "their obligation."
    - ProAm 6y ago
      I completely disagree. Its my website, my servers, my bandwidth I pay for. Google has zero obligation to dictate how others go about creating their own product. They can enforce web standards sure, but AMP is horrific, and Im sure they next-gen AMP will also be counter productive to third parties.
      - shadowgovt 6y ago
        By that reasoning: it's their search engine, their crawlers, their business to route people to the websites likeliest to be useful to those users. In that sense, their approach is in some way more equitable than Microsoft's: they're not forcing change upon your system by way of mandatory updates, they're simply saying that if you don't play the same game they play, they're unwilling to do business with you. If you're free to maintain your server to your standards, why should they not be free to maintain their search service to their standards?

untog 6y ago

It sounds like AMP will stick around, serving as the easiest way to guarantee a great Core Vitals score (because it's so locked down), but that you're welcome to find other ways to get a great score yourself. Which is how it should have always been.

mumblemumble 6y ago

I'm not super happy with the Web Vitals, either. They seem to be pushing the Web toward deploying a lot of otherwise-unnecessary JavaScript cleverness that ultimately presents itself to me in the form of a generally more obnoxious experience. Older and non-Chrome browsers may have difficulty rendering it. Total bandwidth consumption can go up, because it's A-OK to load a bunch of enormous resources later, just as long as it doesn't happen on initial page load, or take longer than 4 seconds to happen, as measured by the company with the fastest Internet connection in the world. Long story short, I don't see it as best practices that serve Internet users as a whole. They seem to be more closely tailored to the interests of Google. And, by extension, the subset of netizens from which they can generate the most revenue.

TonyTrapp 6y ago
I just looked into the search console for the first time in forever, and I'm not sure how Core Web Vitals would be pushing for unnecessary JavaScript. A website consisting of 100% static content seems to be fully okay according to their metrics - but funnily enough, some months ago they claimed that 50% of the pages were served too slowly on computers, while 100% of pages were OK on mobile. Same static server. Now it's the other way around, they randomly say that a random selection of pages is too slow on mobile, and it changes every day. Maybe it's just their own connection that sucks? It also doesn't help that they keep using acronyms for the broken stuff that aren't explained everywhere on the page itself.
- lukebennett 6y ago
  Whilst there is an element of lab measurement involved, they do use field measurement, so metrics are collated from users rather than their own connection. This means that your data could just as easily be skewed by a browser/OS update that rolls out to a ton of devices at once, as much as anything at your end. Do agree that the proliferation of acronyms doesn't help with wrapping your head around it all!
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  It's how the combination of the three encourages you to do things if you want to have a site with rich content. You're supposed to paint the page ASAP, so you don't want to defer loading any large content, but then you're not supposed to have the page layout shift around at all as you dynamically load all that content later, so you've got to do clever things with placeholders and swapping out content and whatnot. You've got up to 4 seconds to load all that stuff, which is enough to load an enormous amount of data over a fast internet connection, so much so that the same amount of content might take minutes to load over a slower connection. Fortunately, they've chosen methods for measuring that metric that are heavily biased toward measuring the experience of people who have 24/7 access to broadband. So, yeah, Google may want to encourage a nice Web experience, but they don't want to back this with metrics that might discourage people from sending too much business in AdSense's direction, or fail to favor Chrome over alternative browsers.

mtgx 6y ago

Were they? It seems that Google's Pagespeed Insights, which is the basis for Core Web Vitals, by default considers content paint performance to be (a very arbitrary) 4x slower on mobile than on desktop. https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/speed/get-started https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/spee... That to me seems like a pretty naked attempt to get everyone to "just use AMP for mobile."

stefan_ 6y ago

Is showing full screen images on desktop an industry-wide best practice? How about the faux navigation bars meant to resemble browser chrome? This "Google was just forcing publishers to fix their pages" meme desperately needs to die. Just consider all the extra standards crap they were pushing to introduce to perfect the deception. This was, as always, about owning the data.

s17n 6y ago
Except... they didn't own the data? AMP was conceived because Google was worried about everything moving into Facebook's walled garden. That's what it was competing against. Google doesn't need to own the data because Google is the world's gateway to the open web. They don't care who owns the data as long as they can crawl it.

achairapart 6y ago

To me AMP was just Google trying to turn the web itself in its own walled garden (after many failed social media attempts). And, as I read in the article, it looks like behind this move there is some current "Antitrust Pressure" plus publishers quite pissed off about losing both control and revenue themselves (as much as 39% less conversions, they says.). Clearly AMP was way more in Google master plans than a poor web performance palliative. [Edit] This was the article linked to this story when I commented (now changed to some Google Dev docs): https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/11/19/as-antitrust-pressure-mounts-google-to-pull-back-benefit-to-news-sites-that-adopted-its-preferred-mobile-technology https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/11/19/as-antitru...

ehsankia 6y ago
I never saw any convincing argument that AMP helped pushed a walled garden, at least not in any common accepted sense of that term. It was open source, it was used by many others including competitors, it was optional and it didn't block access from anyone. Having an AMP version in no way "locked" you to any garden, AMP versions aren't even meant to be the canonical page anyways. It may have had a lot of issues, but "walled garden" would not be one of them.
- pushrax 6y ago
  I always viewed AMP as being primarily for Google’s data collection interests, not primarily lock-in.
- tyingq 6y ago
  The carousel setup it enabled was certainly a (soft) walled garden. It hijacked the top portion of a publisher's page, the back button, and swipe actions, resulting in more time spent on Google.
- achairapart 6y ago
  All of the antitrust case is about how Google pushed its user searches to its own proprieties. And it was as optional as publishers were almost forced to jump in it to stay relevant in News SEO.