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Thank you. I'm fine with AMP being offered as an optional framework on developers can build fast web pages. I'm not okay with Google giving preferential searc

Thank you. I'm fine with AMP being offered as an optional framework on developers can build fast web pages. I'm not okay with Google giving preferential search treatment to pages built using their own technology. If Google wants to prioritize fast pages, that's cool. AMP can be useful tool for making fast pages. But AMP is not necessary to make a fast page.

xwdv 6y ago
Don't thank them just yet, there will be a catch.
s17n 6y ago
> But AMP is not necessary to make a fast page. That's true, but almost no non-AMP news sites aren't total garbage (and some of them have even manage to make their AMP sites terrible). Without Google taking an aggressive approach, things will get worse, not better.
- ballenf 6y ago
  I don't think anyone (here) would complain if Google explicitly used Lighthouse scores in ranking algorithms. Or any similar agnostic user experience ranking.
  - s17n 6y ago
    "We need to make an AMP site to get into this carousel" is a much easier sell (to executives) than "we need to rebuild our site according to some not completely specified principles to hopefully get a higher search rank".
    - stephenr 6y ago
      It really can’t be hard to set a metric. Time limit (load time and render time), and to a lesser degree, weight limit (ie total resources size). This is hardly a new concept.
      - josephg 6y ago
        Yeah; and the spectre of page weight might be a good motivating factor. "Each useless tracker we add lowers our search rank. Are we sure we need to add this one?"
      - IanCal 6y ago
        Load time in what browser? Over what connection? When is it loaded - all pictures or just the text? How much text? Does all the JavaScript have to have loaded? What about the calls that makes, do they need to complete? Is it better to have one more second before first render or one more megabyte of data? I don't think it's a simple problem.
        markdown 6y ago
        It's a multibillion dollar company with thousands of the best tech minds in the world in their employ. With the massive pool of talent they have, this stuff isn't exactly rocket surgery.
        IanCal 6y ago
        There is no single clear metric, that's the issue. It's a lazy approach to just say that problems must be simple because they're a big company.
        stephenr 6y ago
        Fine, if you can't pick a number out of your ass and say "sites must load in less than 1.5 seconds from <simulated average connection> to appear in our special box" just use it as a ranking value. Fill the special box with relevant results to the search, and use load time for the result as a weighting. So if your content is ridiculously on-topic but a little slower to load, you'll still probably be in the special little box, but a slightly less specific site thats super fast to load might be before your site. As has been mentioned: google has used page load times as a metric for a long time. The difference is they didn't add a "special little box" to incentivise sites with otherwise shit decision making skills to do the right thing. But sure. Tell me how forcing clients to download a bunch of javascript, and introducing forced 8 second blank pages for anyone who dares to not load said javascript is all about making pages faster. Give me a fucking break. If you want to live in the fucking google sphere, that's your choice, but don't pretend that their motives are anything but hostile to the very concept of the open web.
    - blackoil 6y ago
      SEO optimization is a large industry. n% boost in organic traffic is very measureable.
  - sdfhbdf 6y ago
    They will in next year - it's called Core Web Vitals [0]. [0]: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating...
- underwater 6y ago
  When I worked as a publisher AMP pages were slower to render than our web pages, though faster with the head start Google gives them. Google could introduce rewards for fast web pages too, but chose not to.
  - s17n 6y ago
    Google already does reward faster pages and publishes tools for benchmarking yourself but it hasn't had anywhere near the impact that the AMP carousel did.
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      Doesn't this tell us that their penalty on slow pages just wasn't harsh enough? If publishing slow, bloated pages would reliably come at the cost of not being featured in the first page of Google results, sites would soon change their ways.
      - s17n 6y ago
        Maybe, maybe not. Rewriting your existing site is much riskier for an organization than adding a new site which gets its traffic from a new source, while your existing site continues to chug along as normal (albeit with gradually declining search traffic from Google as the AMP box takes more and more of the share).
        MaxBarraclough 6y ago
        I don't agree with your uncertainty here. If Google imposed a seriously strong penalty against bloated websites, people would promptly stop making new bloated websites, and would invest in lessening the bloat of their existing sites. I can't think of a more certain spur to action than Google imposing a threat of going undiscovered. It's perfectly normal for web companies to flout the GDPR, say, as it's laughably unenforced, but Google rankings are no joke. edit: a few tweaks
- acdha 6y ago
  WashingtonPost.com consistently renders faster than AMP for me. The main thing is that they have a solid engineering culture and thus don’t have a ton of JavaScript in the critical path to rendering so you don’t get the AMP behavior of showing a blank page for many seconds when anything goes wrong loading Google’s multiple large JavaScript files. If you use a mobile device this happens surprisingly frequently - it was one of the factors motivating me to switch to DDG since Google favoring AMP meant I’d hit blank pages multiple times a day.
square90 6y ago
Yup, I agree. Some folks have got pretty good light, fast pages for example, http://lite.cnn.com/ http://lite.cnn.com/ is one of my favorites.
- usr1106 6y ago
  make that https://lite.cnn.com https://lite.cnn.com , please :)
segmondy 6y ago
They are just playing defense since the govt is coming after them for being a monopoly and abusing their power and position.
- Ajedi32 6y ago
  FWIW they announced their intention to do this over two years ago now, in March 2018: > Based on what we learned from AMP, we now feel ready to take the next step and work to support more instant-loading content not based on AMP technology in areas of Google Search designed for this, like the Top Stories carousel. This content will need to follow a set of future web standards and meet a set of objective performance and user experience criteria to be eligible. Source: https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/03/08/standardizing-lessons-learned-from-amp/ https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/03/08/standardizing-lesso...
tomhallett 6y ago
There are 4 levels to how Google could give preferential treatment: * To pages which are fast. This is based on measurement of a specified benchmark, regardless of the implementation used to achieve those results. * To pages which meet an AMP specification (do this, don't do this, etc) and are validated to conform to the spec. Publishers can bring their own hardware (CDN/Servers) and their own code (serverside language, javascript framework) to do it. Google's AMP servers as the defacto/reference implementation, but publishers/competitors are free to deviate from it. (Look at prebid.js as an example). * To pages which use the AMP Framework code as-is (serverside and clientside) provided by the Google Team, but you can bring your own hardware or have to use a set of accredited hosting providers. * To pages which use AMP and are hosted by Google. Obviously the last one is the "simplest" in regards to getting it off the ground, but AMP has been around long enough and Google has enough resources that they could definitely do one of the other options which go much more to the open web. Note: if you first thought says "verification of any of these things is way too hard and it's so subjective, so we shouldn't even try", then I'd recommend looking at Google's policies for when you can use their "skippable ads" (TrueView) on your video player. It's very manual and up to a lot of human interpretation when you get into the weeds: https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/3522024?hl=en#trueview-and-skippable-video-ads https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/3522024?hl=en#tr... Or if you think "maintaining a list of approved vendors is too hard of a problem", look at their list of approved vendors for Advertising: https://developers.google.com/third-party-ads/googleads-vendors https://developers.google.com/third-party-ads/googleads-vend...
- fooey 6y ago
  _Requiring_ any arbitrary metric or technology stack to be allowed at the top of the google search result is utterly antithetical to the idea of a search engine providing the "best" result for a search. Having a faster site than a competitor should be a boost, but if their content is better, they should win the better ranking. Google requiring Google's own technology is pretty blatant abuse everyone can understand.
  - IanCal 6y ago
    There is no clear ordering as you are already talking about two dimensions. Should a page with a fraction of a fraction of a percent better content that takes 20s to load and is barely functional on a mobile browser take precedence over something that actually works better for me as an end user?
whalabi 6y ago
I wrote about how Google doesn't need AMP to rank pages by speed: https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed It's important to note that Google will continue to require AMP for things like swiping up to see the page an image search result comes from. This is more able to be fairly rationalised, I believe, because it relies on technical improvements that AMP offers beyond speed, like static layout. Still, I don't see why whether a page implements AMP is the only way Google can make that decision. Google already measures cumulative layout shift: https://web.dev/vitals/ https://web.dev/vitals/. I think it's clear from everything Google has done and how they've pushed AMP that one of their goals is to get people to use AMP in particular, as opposed to get people to make mostly static, fast websites. And as we've seen, if huge swathes of the web feel compelled (or forced) to use AMP, it affords Google a massive amount of power over how people consume content on the web.
varispeed 6y ago
Do you understand that AMP true purpose is to remove Ad revenue from outlets using other Ad providers than Ad Sense? Google has a huge conflict of interest with this "framework" and uses their position to force people to use it. I think this should be looked into by appropriate bodies that handle anti-competitive behaviour in the markets.
cannedslime 6y ago
The whole notion that you must use AMP to serve static text faster is hysterical.

xwdv 6y ago

Don't thank them just yet, there will be a catch.

s17n 6y ago

> But AMP is not necessary to make a fast page. That's true, but almost no non-AMP news sites aren't total garbage (and some of them have even manage to make their AMP sites terrible). Without Google taking an aggressive approach, things will get worse, not better.

ballenf 6y ago
I don't think anyone (here) would complain if Google explicitly used Lighthouse scores in ranking algorithms. Or any similar agnostic user experience ranking.
- s17n 6y ago
  "We need to make an AMP site to get into this carousel" is a much easier sell (to executives) than "we need to rebuild our site according to some not completely specified principles to hopefully get a higher search rank".
  - stephenr 6y ago
    It really can’t be hard to set a metric. Time limit (load time and render time), and to a lesser degree, weight limit (ie total resources size). This is hardly a new concept.
    - josephg 6y ago
      Yeah; and the spectre of page weight might be a good motivating factor. "Each useless tracker we add lowers our search rank. Are we sure we need to add this one?"
    - IanCal 6y ago
      Load time in what browser? Over what connection? When is it loaded - all pictures or just the text? How much text? Does all the JavaScript have to have loaded? What about the calls that makes, do they need to complete? Is it better to have one more second before first render or one more megabyte of data? I don't think it's a simple problem.
      - markdown 6y ago
        It's a multibillion dollar company with thousands of the best tech minds in the world in their employ. With the massive pool of talent they have, this stuff isn't exactly rocket surgery.
        IanCal 6y ago
        There is no single clear metric, that's the issue. It's a lazy approach to just say that problems must be simple because they're a big company.
        stephenr 6y ago
        Fine, if you can't pick a number out of your ass and say "sites must load in less than 1.5 seconds from <simulated average connection> to appear in our special box" just use it as a ranking value. Fill the special box with relevant results to the search, and use load time for the result as a weighting. So if your content is ridiculously on-topic but a little slower to load, you'll still probably be in the special little box, but a slightly less specific site thats super fast to load might be before your site. As has been mentioned: google has used page load times as a metric for a long time. The difference is they didn't add a "special little box" to incentivise sites with otherwise shit decision making skills to do the right thing. But sure. Tell me how forcing clients to download a bunch of javascript, and introducing forced 8 second blank pages for anyone who dares to not load said javascript is all about making pages faster. Give me a fucking break. If you want to live in the fucking google sphere, that's your choice, but don't pretend that their motives are anything but hostile to the very concept of the open web.
  - blackoil 6y ago
    SEO optimization is a large industry. n% boost in organic traffic is very measureable.
- sdfhbdf 6y ago
  They will in next year - it's called Core Web Vitals [0]. [0]: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating...
underwater 6y ago
When I worked as a publisher AMP pages were slower to render than our web pages, though faster with the head start Google gives them. Google could introduce rewards for fast web pages too, but chose not to.
- s17n 6y ago
  Google already does reward faster pages and publishes tools for benchmarking yourself but it hasn't had anywhere near the impact that the AMP carousel did.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    Doesn't this tell us that their penalty on slow pages just wasn't harsh enough? If publishing slow, bloated pages would reliably come at the cost of not being featured in the first page of Google results, sites would soon change their ways.
    - s17n 6y ago
      Maybe, maybe not. Rewriting your existing site is much riskier for an organization than adding a new site which gets its traffic from a new source, while your existing site continues to chug along as normal (albeit with gradually declining search traffic from Google as the AMP box takes more and more of the share).
      - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
        I don't agree with your uncertainty here. If Google imposed a seriously strong penalty against bloated websites, people would promptly stop making new bloated websites, and would invest in lessening the bloat of their existing sites. I can't think of a more certain spur to action than Google imposing a threat of going undiscovered. It's perfectly normal for web companies to flout the GDPR, say, as it's laughably unenforced, but Google rankings are no joke. edit: a few tweaks
acdha 6y ago
WashingtonPost.com consistently renders faster than AMP for me. The main thing is that they have a solid engineering culture and thus don’t have a ton of JavaScript in the critical path to rendering so you don’t get the AMP behavior of showing a blank page for many seconds when anything goes wrong loading Google’s multiple large JavaScript files. If you use a mobile device this happens surprisingly frequently - it was one of the factors motivating me to switch to DDG since Google favoring AMP meant I’d hit blank pages multiple times a day.

square90 6y ago

Yup, I agree. Some folks have got pretty good light, fast pages for example, http://lite.cnn.com/ http://lite.cnn.com/ is one of my favorites.

usr1106 6y ago
make that https://lite.cnn.com https://lite.cnn.com , please :)

segmondy 6y ago

They are just playing defense since the govt is coming after them for being a monopoly and abusing their power and position.

Ajedi32 6y ago
FWIW they announced their intention to do this over two years ago now, in March 2018: > Based on what we learned from AMP, we now feel ready to take the next step and work to support more instant-loading content not based on AMP technology in areas of Google Search designed for this, like the Top Stories carousel. This content will need to follow a set of future web standards and meet a set of objective performance and user experience criteria to be eligible. Source: https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/03/08/standardizing-lessons-learned-from-amp/ https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/03/08/standardizing-lesso...

tomhallett 6y ago

There are 4 levels to how Google could give preferential treatment: * To pages which are fast. This is based on measurement of a specified benchmark, regardless of the implementation used to achieve those results. * To pages which meet an AMP specification (do this, don't do this, etc) and are validated to conform to the spec. Publishers can bring their own hardware (CDN/Servers) and their own code (serverside language, javascript framework) to do it. Google's AMP servers as the defacto/reference implementation, but publishers/competitors are free to deviate from it. (Look at prebid.js as an example). * To pages which use the AMP Framework code as-is (serverside and clientside) provided by the Google Team, but you can bring your own hardware or have to use a set of accredited hosting providers. * To pages which use AMP and are hosted by Google. Obviously the last one is the "simplest" in regards to getting it off the ground, but AMP has been around long enough and Google has enough resources that they could definitely do one of the other options which go much more to the open web. Note: if you first thought says "verification of any of these things is way too hard and it's so subjective, so we shouldn't even try", then I'd recommend looking at Google's policies for when you can use their "skippable ads" (TrueView) on your video player. It's very manual and up to a lot of human interpretation when you get into the weeds: https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/3522024?hl=en#trueview-and-skippable-video-ads https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/3522024?hl=en#tr... Or if you think "maintaining a list of approved vendors is too hard of a problem", look at their list of approved vendors for Advertising: https://developers.google.com/third-party-ads/googleads-vendors https://developers.google.com/third-party-ads/googleads-vend...

fooey 6y ago
_Requiring_ any arbitrary metric or technology stack to be allowed at the top of the google search result is utterly antithetical to the idea of a search engine providing the "best" result for a search. Having a faster site than a competitor should be a boost, but if their content is better, they should win the better ranking. Google requiring Google's own technology is pretty blatant abuse everyone can understand.
- IanCal 6y ago
  There is no clear ordering as you are already talking about two dimensions. Should a page with a fraction of a fraction of a percent better content that takes 20s to load and is barely functional on a mobile browser take precedence over something that actually works better for me as an end user?

whalabi 6y ago

I wrote about how Google doesn't need AMP to rank pages by speed: https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed It's important to note that Google will continue to require AMP for things like swiping up to see the page an image search result comes from. This is more able to be fairly rationalised, I believe, because it relies on technical improvements that AMP offers beyond speed, like static layout. Still, I don't see why whether a page implements AMP is the only way Google can make that decision. Google already measures cumulative layout shift: https://web.dev/vitals/ https://web.dev/vitals/. I think it's clear from everything Google has done and how they've pushed AMP that one of their goals is to get people to use AMP in particular, as opposed to get people to make mostly static, fast websites. And as we've seen, if huge swathes of the web feel compelled (or forced) to use AMP, it affords Google a massive amount of power over how people consume content on the web.

varispeed 6y ago

Do you understand that AMP true purpose is to remove Ad revenue from outlets using other Ad providers than Ad Sense? Google has a huge conflict of interest with this "framework" and uses their position to force people to use it. I think this should be looked into by appropriate bodies that handle anti-competitive behaviour in the markets.

cannedslime 6y ago

The whole notion that you must use AMP to serve static text faster is hysterical.