18 ms·

AMP pages no longer get preferential treatment in Google search

719 points by ColinWright 5y ago

petee 5y ago
Yes! I can't wait till its gone altogether. The whole AMP experience from an end user, really sucked. Pick a reason, but nearly every article always has something broken, missing, or misrepresented. Fifty percent of the time I would either need to click the original link, or give up on the content.
- EForEndeavour 5y ago
  I used to Google things on mobile and append `site:reddit.com` to filter out SEO-laden blogspam and zero in on the familiar confirmation bias of other reddit addicts. Then I had to tolerate the following antipattern of the modern web: 1. tap a Google search result link 2. tap the tiny "i" icon on the left side of the stupid AMP page header to display the actual URL of the page I'm trying to navigate to 3. tap the displayed URL itself in the AMP header 4. close reddit's "this looks better in the app!" bottom banner 5. scroll down and tap "VIEW ALL X COMMENTS" So fast. So usable. On the bright side, this rigmarole has really done wonders for my productivity because I've simply stopped bothering.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    > close reddit's "this looks better in the app!" bottom banner I hate that. It's self-fulfulling really isn't it, may as well simply read 'this banner not present in the app'. A bit like those joke signs warning you not to steal/deface the sign.
    - cube00 5y ago
      At least they stopped with the "you deserve the best"
  - raldi 5y ago
    I don’t go anywhere without my “turn off AMP” and “kill dickbars” bookmarklets.
    - acqq 5y ago
      Can you publish them please?
      - raldi 5y ago
        javascript:(function()%7B(function%20()%20%7Bvar%20i%2C%20elements%20%3D%20document.querySelectorAll('body%20\*')%3Bfor%20(i%20%3D%200%3B%20i%20%3C%20elements.length%3B%20i%2B%2B)%20%7Bif%20(getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position%20%3D%3D%3D%20'fixed')%20%7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)() javascript:var%20url%20=%20false;var%20links%20=%20document.getElementsByTagName('link');Object.keys(links).forEach(function(key)%7Bif(links%5Bkey%5D.rel%20!==%20'canonical')%7Breturn;%7D;url%20=%20links%5Bkey%5D.href;%7D);if(!url)%7B%20alert('No%20Canonical%20URL');%20%7D;if(url)%7Bdocument.location%20=%20url;%7D;
        sunshineforever 5y ago
        How do I use this?
        raldi 5y ago
        Google bookmarklet
        acqq 5y ago
        Many thanks!
  - clydethefrog 5y ago
    I am also happy the AMP reddit links are gone - because it was a way to bypass my reddit block on my phone. To get a quick readable version you always add a i. to the URL, so i.reddit.com. I am afraid of the day they will remove that.
  - GuB-42 5y ago
    Reddit mobile is deliberately terrible, amp or not. They want you to use their app. Use "old.reddit.com" (old style, best on desktop but ok on mobile) or "i.reddit.com" (minimalist, for mobile) if you want something usable.
    - kevincox 5y ago
      If you log into Reddit you can configure reddit.com to use the old interface. (at least for now).
      - Stratoscope 5y ago
        That works on desktop, not on mobile.
        ewindal 5y ago
        Sure it does. I’m defaulting to old reddit without old in the url while browsing on mobile.
        p49k 5y ago
        Yes, but every couple days it switches back and you have to “request desktop site”.
        alisonkisk 5y ago
        And it forces a super wide layout that requires either zooming out microscopic font size or scrolling horizontally for every line of text.
      - lmm 5y ago
        No you can't, it will pretend to accept your preference and then randomly reset it after a few days.
        kevincox 5y ago
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    You could've just used Firefox and old Reddit.
  - mwaitjmp 5y ago
    Very true.... I’ve suffered the exact same process for years. Step 2 is the worst, not sure why but sometimes it’s incredibly hard to tap the i button. New reddit is is a very strange design. I always thought the way it hides comment threads as a link to a new page was just a mobile thing, but no, that’s the design. The old site is so so much better. Trying to get to it from a google search is infuriating, especially if you are trying to view multiple results. Imagine doing the above steps 5 times for 5 different results!
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    It is better in the app, just usually not one of their creation...
    - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
      I wish people understood how much power and information apps installed on phones had compared to websites. “Nudging” to install an app you use to collect a ton more data because you intentionally broke the website is fucking evil. Maybe someone has a Reddit app that isn’t a data mining jerk. IDK. But if not, I still prefer to give no one extra data over just not giving it to Reddit.
      - alickz 5y ago
        What information do apps have access to (without asking permission) that websites don't have?
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    Sadly Reddit has been A/B testing changes where they decide to hide the X button in that banner.
  - DocG 5y ago
    I changed to FF mobile just because of amp.. Ain't going back either, the URL bar is at the bottom. It's magical ^^
  - skunkworker 5y ago
    On my iPhone I setup a shortcut that will take a reddit url and open it natively in Narwhal. It's very handy and I'm not a huge fan of the official reddit app.
  - nonpolitic 5y ago
    To be fair, Reddit itself is mostly to blame for the UX hellhole it's become. AMP certainly doesn't help but they have made so many shortsighted decisions recently wrt app nags etc completely of their own accord in their ongoing weird push towards engagement/monetisation.
- matsemann 5y ago
  Until last year or so, Google intentionally gave a worse version of google search when using Firefox on Android. I installed a user-agent-spoofer to pretend to be Chrome, and I got the perfectly functioning page. But then I also got results including AMP links, so quickly disabled the extension and went back to the old ugly result page... 9 out of 10 times AMP pages in Firefox failed to be scrollable. Like the static/fixed top and bottom banner somehow screwed up scroll behavior.
- kristopolous 5y ago
  The pre-amp world was also completely utterly terrible though. Do you remember mobile news websites circa 2015? It was full of so much ad tech that if a site didn't make your phone hot and crash the browser the best experience you could possibly get would be a couple ad and email form click throughs, maybe a video fading in over the entire content like some trashy mobile app, followed by a scroll jack, a backbutton jacking, then more videos just magically appearing in between paragraphs pushing them apart like some kind of infestation, it was just utterly unusable. The text that you were lucky enough to catch would quickly fly up and down the screen as more ads start rendering and load in at every div tag with multiple jingles and voice-overs for car insurance and refinancing playing out of your phone all at once. You think "well maybe I really don't care that much about what that diplomat said after all". It was a complete waste of time. They were almost all like this as if there was some secret competition among the news sites, like as if some coveted award was at stake for the craziest most unusable experience.
  - petee 5y ago
    I do recall, but the problem is the of the list of prior-issues you present, half those issues still persist in AMP, minus motion/fading effects. There are still so many ads it bogs down; ads break up content; there are articles indicated as text but masquerading as videos surrounded by ads. Alot of AMP articles are simply a link telling you to continue to the full page! All seems like new forms of the same old. I'm not sure how its even possible, but I encountered one page I swear hijacked the back button.
    - kristopolous 5y ago
      The back button hijacking is easy. You can "push" something into the "navigation stack" and then detect the "state change" of the back button. There's a few pretty simple ways to do this without magic. The website you're thinking of that does it is slashdot, sorry for the bad news. It's long been merely a shadow of the past. Amp initially didn't allow JavaScript. It had a bunch of restrictions. I honestly think it was good people doing it for a good cause but then the corporate meat grinding machine had to process it and they turned it into a power play and data mining operation. Once again, the solution is inescapable both for /. and the goog; take big money out of tech. Every significant computer revolution basically started on that premise. Time to roll it again. Consolidated power breeds incompetency. Our most noble task in life is to make the necessary possible and then inevitable
- enos_feedler 5y ago
  Isn’t this just your average news site on the web though?
iandanforth 5y ago
I really really want this to be true. Unfortunately I can just see some ambitious PM picking this up again and trying to push it even harder. "The real reason the previous initiative failed to gain traction was insufficient market education."
- wkrsz 5y ago
  I'd expect those ambitious PMs to pitch new projects that do the same thing under a new name.
  - rodiger 5y ago
    "This would be great as part of our new AMP Messenger!" Jokes aside, I wonder how one could measure above-average PM performance without tying it to product launches.
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      >I wonder how one could measure above-average PM performance without tying it to product launches. By understanding the circumstances and work of the people you're managing, so that you can subtract confounding factors and separate their influence from everything else. There is absolutely no substitute for that, but because it takes actual work and attention, businesses the world over have been trying to replace it with paper thin metrics since time immemorial.
  - ikiris 5y ago
    Always 2 there are: The not ready yet, and the deprecated.
- the_duke 5y ago
  > There’s been a lot of antitrust scrutiny on Google and it may have played a role in this change of heart. I'm pretty sure that's the primary reason, which won't change anytime soon. I'd also expect many publishers that adopted AMP to jump ship now, which means it will slowly die away.
Tsarbomb 5y ago
Thank goodness.
pwinnski 5y ago
The complaints of web users still have power for now. Slow, tracker-laden web pages are still terrible, AMP was just the wrong solution.
- mthoms 5y ago
  I don't think that users complaints actually had any impact. It seems more likely that avoiding regulatory scrutiny was G's motivation in scrapping AMP.
  - pwinnski 5y ago
    Why not both? There are companies pushing the boundaries every day, with governments generally failing to even investigate unless there are enough complaints to raise attention. Complaints by themselves depend only on shame, which most companies seem to avoid easily. Complaints that catch the attention of governments, on the other hand...
  - Angostura 5y ago
    Perhaps, or they were seeing an uptick in DDG usage on mobile.
  - pydry 5y ago
    User complaints do drive regulatory scrutiny, and Google will point to a lack of user complaints to try to justify its behavior.
- ridaj 5y ago
  It was the wrong long-term solution for sure. But I think it forced publishers to reevaluate their priorities with respect to bloat and loading times, whereas prior attempts at quietly calling attention to the problem apparently didn't make a shred of difference...
  - criddell 5y ago
    AMP pages no longer get preferential treatment explicitly, but I'm guessing time-to-load is still a signal that is used by the algorithm. I wonder if they have hard guidelines? Something like "your page should load and render in 1000 ms" on a broadband connection.
overcast 5y ago
First Flash, and now Amp. Sometimes good things do happen.
melomal 5y ago
Good riddance.
tyingq 5y ago
Unfortunately, AMP has a lot of inertia. I just tried a bunch of different queries on Chrome/Android, and all the carousel entries still have the AMP lighting bolt. Newspaper dev shops probably don't have the money to justify a standalone "get rid of AMP" project. So it will take a while to see some migration away. Anyone have a query that results in a carousel story that isn't an AMP one? Edit: Found one. "Biden Covid" results in an NPR story in the carousel that is not AMP.
- AS_of 5y ago
  They say the update is coming in June.
jepper 5y ago
Good riddance. A thinly veiled power grab to make the web a walled garden. Now lets do the obvious thing and just do preferential treatment for fast loading pages.
rado 5y ago
Good riddance.
king_magic 5y ago
AMP is web cancer. Looking forward to seeing it die.
rapnie 5y ago
AMP: The thing I wanted to go away like any other, but was never really exposed to with Firefox and DDG :)
joegahona 5y ago
This hasn't happened yet, so the title is misleading/clickbait. Also the notion that Google will (allegedly) no longer prefer AMP pages is old news.
rchaud 5y ago
From the article: >> The Top Stories carousel feature on Google Search will be updated to include all news content. This means that using the AMP format is no longer required and that any page, irrespective of its Core Web Vitals score or page experience status, will be eligible to appear in the Top Stories carousel. It doesn't say AMP will not get preferential treatment, it just says your page doesn't have to be using AMP. Don't forget Google has Web Stories[0] to fill this gap as well. [0] https://stories.google/ https://stories.google/
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iou 5y ago
Is the AMP strategy to be that the internet dislikes it so much that we're willing to pay to not see it? :thinking:
adflux 5y ago
AMP was just a disingenious Google power grab all along...
nindalf 5y ago
The article talks about Core Web Vitals in passing. That's the major change here. Two posts from May 2020 talk about them more - https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/introducing-web-vitals-essential-metrics.html https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/introducing-web-vitals-ess... introduces these metrics, what they mean and how to measure them. - https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating... talks about how the search engine experience will change > The change for non-AMP content to become eligible to appear in the mobile Top Stories feature in Search will also roll out in May 2021. Any page that meets the Google News content policies will be eligible and we will prioritize pages with great page experience, whether implemented using AMP or any other web technology, as we rank the results. > In addition to the timing updates described above, we plan to test a visual indicator that highlights pages in search results that have great page experience. Seems like a positive change. It will mean extra work as developers improve the performance of their sites. But having clear metrics to improve will make that work tractable. Also, advocating for that work to senior management will be easier when it's so clearly tied to SEO. The upshot is that ordinary users will experience a more performant web. Not overnight but over a few years, like the shift to HTTPS and supporting mobile web versions. Both of those changes were driven in part by the desire for better ranking on Google.
- donohoe 5y ago
  Yeah, but in reality most news sites will fail Core Web Vitals in their current state. Out of 71 tracked articles on news sites, only 3 or 4 score 85 or higher in overall Performance as tested by Google Lighthouse. Article Performance Leaderboard: https://webperf.xyz/ https://webperf.xyz/
  - notatoad 5y ago
    good the amp detractors have always said that we don't need amp because authors can just make their websites faster instead. here's the chance to see whether or not that's true. news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings.
Dah00n 5y ago
Hmm, i seem to remember this being written by plausible before and posted here. Is this really an ad?
ec109685 5y ago
"Your site can be faster than AMP without using AMP" That isn't true. Google is able to cache AMP pages in their CDN and preload and pre-render them in the browser or in Google News. You can't beat that with even the most optimized site. AMP, especially on iOS, is awkward for many reasons and having to support two formats by publishers isn't great, but it is unquestionably fast when rendered within a container that supports AMP.
- malinens 5y ago
  you can easily beat downloading hundreds of kilobytes of amp JS stuff from supa-fast and mega-optimized google CDN by not downloading JS at all or using js very conservatively
  - ec109685 5y ago
    Google does all that in the background on the Google SERP page, so users don't feel that slowness at all.
  - s17n 5y ago
    That is not going to happen, though.
- Seirdy 5y ago
  The time to first paint for a smallish website from across the planet seldom crosses the two-second mark. I would happily take that over a website that fails to load from a server <100 miles from me because my packet loss is >40%.
  - ec109685 5y ago
    Trick is that google w/ AMP does all the loading in the background, so it can hide hide the latency from you.
- lmm 5y ago
  > That isn't true. Google is able to cache AMP pages in their CDN and preload and pre-render them in the browser or in Google News. You can't beat that with even the most optimized site. Surely you can do that same pre-rendering yourself, and serve the result of it?
heavyset_go 5y ago
Google should do the same for blog spam pages that are laden with AdSense ads.
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amelius 5y ago
... but we're still measuring page load speed, and hey, AMP is still faster in most cases.
bvanderveen 5y ago
Here's a non-AMP site that works great: https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/ Speaking from experience, it loads lightning-fast even on an ancient Android device on nerfed 2G data roaming internationally. And the user experience can't be beaten. Make the web hypertext again!
- ehsankia 5y ago
  Great, you found one site that works great. Here's a million others that don't and take 10s+ to load on mobile. I'm not sure what your point is. The day every website out there makes fast and performant websites like the above without any stick or carrot, then you will have a point, but unfortunately we don't live in such a world.
  - birdyrooster 5y ago
    I missed the source to a million others. I haven't noticed this problem. AMP always seemed like a solution in search of a problem.
- aero-glide2 5y ago
  Nice web design. Now talking about the headlines itself, each and every headline is about a negative news story. If you only read npr you would think the world is on flames.
  - sellyme 5y ago
    Possibly this was not there when you looked at it, but right now as I view the third headline in the list is as follows: > Congress Passes Bill To Counter The Rise In Anti-Asian Hate Crimes ...which despite the negative language is definitely a positive news story.
    - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
      Is it a positive story? Sounds it! But... aren’t hate crimes already illegal? Was there some Asian Exclusion that is being removed? Is this feel good legislation? Or is this also an example of “world on fire” narrative?
amcoastal 5y ago
Am I the only person who experiences longer load time on amp pages? I literally have to click the little paperclip at the top of an amp page to go to the regular one to load in like 50% of the time. Is it because I use Firefox or something?
willhinsa 5y ago
X to doubt
aww_dang 5y ago
I wish they would look at the bloat in some of their own services. Analytics would be a good place to start. The team(s) attempting to incentivize page speed in the SERPS often seem to be working at cross purposes to other Google projects.
Causality1 5y ago
Great. Next can they no longer get preferential treatment in Chrome Mobile? By that I mean the way they hijack and hide your browser bar and stop you from accessing the tab manager unless you scroll all the back to the top of the page.
contriban 5y ago
I hope newspapers actually look at the alternative though. Some websites are so poor that I preferred sharing the AMP page instead of the original page since the article was not readable on the latter. That’s right. It was so ad- and popup-infested that it was literally useless. AMP wasn’t cancer; The web itself is. Visit some non-major or local website and you’ll see they’re absolute rubbish, especially those that work on the web, like news agencies.
sharken 5y ago
To me AMP is a way of accessing news that would otherwise be blocked off. Other than that i have no real interest in AMP as an end-user.
amperion 5y ago
Yes, AMP is dead and welcome to Page experience which you can achieve through AMP cost effectively :D
amperion 5y ago
You fools AMP just evolved in to Page Experience wake the fuck up
amperion 5y ago
Page Experience is the new AMP
p-sharma 5y ago
Oh great, they now only abuse their dominant positions in 372 instead of 373 cases!
from 5y ago
Reading HN threads about AMP has taught me that it's very easy for people with gigabit internet connections, fast computers and adblockers to ignore the fact that AMP made the web actually usable for large numbers of people who previously had to wait 5 minutes for a page to load.
- watwut 5y ago
  I use off-shelf android browser and old phone. I dont have gigabit internet connection. And hate AMP. Also, it is fair ty say that the people who hate consequences AMP the most are those who use reddit and discussions generally. Because that is where amp fails the most. Which is pretty close to average user. People who dont mind amp are the ones who primary use long form static pages ... which is minority of internet.
- hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
  I don't think that many people argue that page loading times weren't an issue, particularly when mobile networks were much slower. It's just that they think AMP was the wrong solution to that problem. There are other ways Google could have promoted and encouraged lightweight mobile friendly webpages without creating their own new standard.
mitchellst 5y ago
The coverage of this has, I think, been misleading. Google has not officially said (anywhere I can find) that AMP won’t get preferential treatment. They have only said that AMP won’t be required to rank. Those are very different statements. “Sure, we will include a few non amp stories,” is different from assurance that you will not be punished if you remove amp support from your site. The second one might be true— but Google hasn’t confirmed it.

719 points by ColinWright 5y ago

Yes! I can't wait till its gone altogether. The whole AMP experience from an end user, really sucked. Pick a reason, but nearly every article always has something broken, missing, or misrepresented. Fifty percent of the time I would either need to click the original link, or give up on the content.

EForEndeavour 5y ago
I used to Google things on mobile and append `site:reddit.com` to filter out SEO-laden blogspam and zero in on the familiar confirmation bias of other reddit addicts. Then I had to tolerate the following antipattern of the modern web: 1. tap a Google search result link 2. tap the tiny "i" icon on the left side of the stupid AMP page header to display the actual URL of the page I'm trying to navigate to 3. tap the displayed URL itself in the AMP header 4. close reddit's "this looks better in the app!" bottom banner 5. scroll down and tap "VIEW ALL X COMMENTS" So fast. So usable. On the bright side, this rigmarole has really done wonders for my productivity because I've simply stopped bothering.
- OJFord 5y ago
  > close reddit's "this looks better in the app!" bottom banner I hate that. It's self-fulfulling really isn't it, may as well simply read 'this banner not present in the app'. A bit like those joke signs warning you not to steal/deface the sign.
  - cube00 5y ago
    At least they stopped with the "you deserve the best"
- raldi 5y ago
  I don’t go anywhere without my “turn off AMP” and “kill dickbars” bookmarklets.
  - acqq 5y ago
    Can you publish them please?
    - raldi 5y ago
      javascript:(function()%7B(function%20()%20%7Bvar%20i%2C%20elements%20%3D%20document.querySelectorAll('body%20\*')%3Bfor%20(i%20%3D%200%3B%20i%20%3C%20elements.length%3B%20i%2B%2B)%20%7Bif%20(getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position%20%3D%3D%3D%20'fixed')%20%7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)() javascript:var%20url%20=%20false;var%20links%20=%20document.getElementsByTagName('link');Object.keys(links).forEach(function(key)%7Bif(links%5Bkey%5D.rel%20!==%20'canonical')%7Breturn;%7D;url%20=%20links%5Bkey%5D.href;%7D);if(!url)%7B%20alert('No%20Canonical%20URL');%20%7D;if(url)%7Bdocument.location%20=%20url;%7D;
      - sunshineforever 5y ago
        How do I use this?
        raldi 5y ago
        Google bookmarklet
      - acqq 5y ago
        Many thanks!
- clydethefrog 5y ago
  I am also happy the AMP reddit links are gone - because it was a way to bypass my reddit block on my phone. To get a quick readable version you always add a i. to the URL, so i.reddit.com. I am afraid of the day they will remove that.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  Reddit mobile is deliberately terrible, amp or not. They want you to use their app. Use "old.reddit.com" (old style, best on desktop but ok on mobile) or "i.reddit.com" (minimalist, for mobile) if you want something usable.
  - kevincox 5y ago
    If you log into Reddit you can configure reddit.com to use the old interface. (at least for now).
    - Stratoscope 5y ago
      That works on desktop, not on mobile.
      - ewindal 5y ago
        Sure it does. I’m defaulting to old reddit without old in the url while browsing on mobile.
        p49k 5y ago
        Yes, but every couple days it switches back and you have to “request desktop site”.
        alisonkisk 5y ago
        And it forces a super wide layout that requires either zooming out microscopic font size or scrolling horizontally for every line of text.
    - lmm 5y ago
      No you can't, it will pretend to accept your preference and then randomly reset it after a few days.
      - kevincox 5y ago
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  You could've just used Firefox and old Reddit.
- mwaitjmp 5y ago
  Very true.... I’ve suffered the exact same process for years. Step 2 is the worst, not sure why but sometimes it’s incredibly hard to tap the i button. New reddit is is a very strange design. I always thought the way it hides comment threads as a link to a new page was just a mobile thing, but no, that’s the design. The old site is so so much better. Trying to get to it from a google search is infuriating, especially if you are trying to view multiple results. Imagine doing the above steps 5 times for 5 different results!
- mhh__ 5y ago
  It is better in the app, just usually not one of their creation...
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    I wish people understood how much power and information apps installed on phones had compared to websites. “Nudging” to install an app you use to collect a ton more data because you intentionally broke the website is fucking evil. Maybe someone has a Reddit app that isn’t a data mining jerk. IDK. But if not, I still prefer to give no one extra data over just not giving it to Reddit.
    - alickz 5y ago
      What information do apps have access to (without asking permission) that websites don't have?
- saagarjha 5y ago
  Sadly Reddit has been A/B testing changes where they decide to hide the X button in that banner.
- DocG 5y ago
  I changed to FF mobile just because of amp.. Ain't going back either, the URL bar is at the bottom. It's magical ^^
- skunkworker 5y ago
  On my iPhone I setup a shortcut that will take a reddit url and open it natively in Narwhal. It's very handy and I'm not a huge fan of the official reddit app.
- nonpolitic 5y ago
  To be fair, Reddit itself is mostly to blame for the UX hellhole it's become. AMP certainly doesn't help but they have made so many shortsighted decisions recently wrt app nags etc completely of their own accord in their ongoing weird push towards engagement/monetisation.
matsemann 5y ago
Until last year or so, Google intentionally gave a worse version of google search when using Firefox on Android. I installed a user-agent-spoofer to pretend to be Chrome, and I got the perfectly functioning page. But then I also got results including AMP links, so quickly disabled the extension and went back to the old ugly result page... 9 out of 10 times AMP pages in Firefox failed to be scrollable. Like the static/fixed top and bottom banner somehow screwed up scroll behavior.
kristopolous 5y ago
The pre-amp world was also completely utterly terrible though. Do you remember mobile news websites circa 2015? It was full of so much ad tech that if a site didn't make your phone hot and crash the browser the best experience you could possibly get would be a couple ad and email form click throughs, maybe a video fading in over the entire content like some trashy mobile app, followed by a scroll jack, a backbutton jacking, then more videos just magically appearing in between paragraphs pushing them apart like some kind of infestation, it was just utterly unusable. The text that you were lucky enough to catch would quickly fly up and down the screen as more ads start rendering and load in at every div tag with multiple jingles and voice-overs for car insurance and refinancing playing out of your phone all at once. You think "well maybe I really don't care that much about what that diplomat said after all". It was a complete waste of time. They were almost all like this as if there was some secret competition among the news sites, like as if some coveted award was at stake for the craziest most unusable experience.
- petee 5y ago
  I do recall, but the problem is the of the list of prior-issues you present, half those issues still persist in AMP, minus motion/fading effects. There are still so many ads it bogs down; ads break up content; there are articles indicated as text but masquerading as videos surrounded by ads. Alot of AMP articles are simply a link telling you to continue to the full page! All seems like new forms of the same old. I'm not sure how its even possible, but I encountered one page I swear hijacked the back button.
  - kristopolous 5y ago
    The back button hijacking is easy. You can "push" something into the "navigation stack" and then detect the "state change" of the back button. There's a few pretty simple ways to do this without magic. The website you're thinking of that does it is slashdot, sorry for the bad news. It's long been merely a shadow of the past. Amp initially didn't allow JavaScript. It had a bunch of restrictions. I honestly think it was good people doing it for a good cause but then the corporate meat grinding machine had to process it and they turned it into a power play and data mining operation. Once again, the solution is inescapable both for /. and the goog; take big money out of tech. Every significant computer revolution basically started on that premise. Time to roll it again. Consolidated power breeds incompetency. Our most noble task in life is to make the necessary possible and then inevitable
enos_feedler 5y ago
Isn’t this just your average news site on the web though?

iandanforth 5y ago

I really really want this to be true. Unfortunately I can just see some ambitious PM picking this up again and trying to push it even harder. "The real reason the previous initiative failed to gain traction was insufficient market education."

wkrsz 5y ago
I'd expect those ambitious PMs to pitch new projects that do the same thing under a new name.
- rodiger 5y ago
  "This would be great as part of our new AMP Messenger!" Jokes aside, I wonder how one could measure above-average PM performance without tying it to product launches.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    >I wonder how one could measure above-average PM performance without tying it to product launches. By understanding the circumstances and work of the people you're managing, so that you can subtract confounding factors and separate their influence from everything else. There is absolutely no substitute for that, but because it takes actual work and attention, businesses the world over have been trying to replace it with paper thin metrics since time immemorial.
- ikiris 5y ago
  Always 2 there are: The not ready yet, and the deprecated.
the_duke 5y ago
> There’s been a lot of antitrust scrutiny on Google and it may have played a role in this change of heart. I'm pretty sure that's the primary reason, which won't change anytime soon. I'd also expect many publishers that adopted AMP to jump ship now, which means it will slowly die away.

Tsarbomb 5y ago

Thank goodness.

pwinnski 5y ago

The complaints of web users still have power for now. Slow, tracker-laden web pages are still terrible, AMP was just the wrong solution.

mthoms 5y ago
I don't think that users complaints actually had any impact. It seems more likely that avoiding regulatory scrutiny was G's motivation in scrapping AMP.
- pwinnski 5y ago
  Why not both? There are companies pushing the boundaries every day, with governments generally failing to even investigate unless there are enough complaints to raise attention. Complaints by themselves depend only on shame, which most companies seem to avoid easily. Complaints that catch the attention of governments, on the other hand...
- Angostura 5y ago
  Perhaps, or they were seeing an uptick in DDG usage on mobile.
- pydry 5y ago
  User complaints do drive regulatory scrutiny, and Google will point to a lack of user complaints to try to justify its behavior.
ridaj 5y ago
It was the wrong long-term solution for sure. But I think it forced publishers to reevaluate their priorities with respect to bloat and loading times, whereas prior attempts at quietly calling attention to the problem apparently didn't make a shred of difference...
- criddell 5y ago
  AMP pages no longer get preferential treatment explicitly, but I'm guessing time-to-load is still a signal that is used by the algorithm. I wonder if they have hard guidelines? Something like "your page should load and render in 1000 ms" on a broadband connection.

overcast 5y ago

First Flash, and now Amp. Sometimes good things do happen.

melomal 5y ago

Good riddance.

tyingq 5y ago

Unfortunately, AMP has a lot of inertia. I just tried a bunch of different queries on Chrome/Android, and all the carousel entries still have the AMP lighting bolt. Newspaper dev shops probably don't have the money to justify a standalone "get rid of AMP" project. So it will take a while to see some migration away. Anyone have a query that results in a carousel story that isn't an AMP one? Edit: Found one. "Biden Covid" results in an NPR story in the carousel that is not AMP.

AS_of 5y ago
They say the update is coming in June.

jepper 5y ago

Good riddance. A thinly veiled power grab to make the web a walled garden. Now lets do the obvious thing and just do preferential treatment for fast loading pages.

rado 5y ago

Good riddance.

king_magic 5y ago

AMP is web cancer. Looking forward to seeing it die.

rapnie 5y ago

AMP: The thing I wanted to go away like any other, but was never really exposed to with Firefox and DDG :)

joegahona 5y ago

This hasn't happened yet, so the title is misleading/clickbait. Also the notion that Google will (allegedly) no longer prefer AMP pages is old news.

rchaud 5y ago

From the article: >> The Top Stories carousel feature on Google Search will be updated to include all news content. This means that using the AMP format is no longer required and that any page, irrespective of its Core Web Vitals score or page experience status, will be eligible to appear in the Top Stories carousel. It doesn't say AMP will not get preferential treatment, it just says your page doesn't have to be using AMP. Don't forget Google has Web Stories[0] to fill this gap as well. [0] https://stories.google/ https://stories.google/

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iou 5y ago

Is the AMP strategy to be that the internet dislikes it so much that we're willing to pay to not see it? :thinking:

adflux 5y ago

AMP was just a disingenious Google power grab all along...

nindalf 5y ago

The article talks about Core Web Vitals in passing. That's the major change here. Two posts from May 2020 talk about them more - https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/introducing-web-vitals-essential-metrics.html https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/introducing-web-vitals-ess... introduces these metrics, what they mean and how to measure them. - https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating... talks about how the search engine experience will change > The change for non-AMP content to become eligible to appear in the mobile Top Stories feature in Search will also roll out in May 2021. Any page that meets the Google News content policies will be eligible and we will prioritize pages with great page experience, whether implemented using AMP or any other web technology, as we rank the results. > In addition to the timing updates described above, we plan to test a visual indicator that highlights pages in search results that have great page experience. Seems like a positive change. It will mean extra work as developers improve the performance of their sites. But having clear metrics to improve will make that work tractable. Also, advocating for that work to senior management will be easier when it's so clearly tied to SEO. The upshot is that ordinary users will experience a more performant web. Not overnight but over a few years, like the shift to HTTPS and supporting mobile web versions. Both of those changes were driven in part by the desire for better ranking on Google.

donohoe 5y ago
Yeah, but in reality most news sites will fail Core Web Vitals in their current state. Out of 71 tracked articles on news sites, only 3 or 4 score 85 or higher in overall Performance as tested by Google Lighthouse. Article Performance Leaderboard: https://webperf.xyz/ https://webperf.xyz/
- notatoad 5y ago
  good the amp detractors have always said that we don't need amp because authors can just make their websites faster instead. here's the chance to see whether or not that's true. news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings.

Dah00n 5y ago

Hmm, i seem to remember this being written by plausible before and posted here. Is this really an ad?

ec109685 5y ago

"Your site can be faster than AMP without using AMP" That isn't true. Google is able to cache AMP pages in their CDN and preload and pre-render them in the browser or in Google News. You can't beat that with even the most optimized site. AMP, especially on iOS, is awkward for many reasons and having to support two formats by publishers isn't great, but it is unquestionably fast when rendered within a container that supports AMP.

malinens 5y ago
you can easily beat downloading hundreds of kilobytes of amp JS stuff from supa-fast and mega-optimized google CDN by not downloading JS at all or using js very conservatively
- ec109685 5y ago
  Google does all that in the background on the Google SERP page, so users don't feel that slowness at all.
- s17n 5y ago
  That is not going to happen, though.
Seirdy 5y ago
The time to first paint for a smallish website from across the planet seldom crosses the two-second mark. I would happily take that over a website that fails to load from a server <100 miles from me because my packet loss is >40%.
- ec109685 5y ago
  Trick is that google w/ AMP does all the loading in the background, so it can hide hide the latency from you.
lmm 5y ago
> That isn't true. Google is able to cache AMP pages in their CDN and preload and pre-render them in the browser or in Google News. You can't beat that with even the most optimized site. Surely you can do that same pre-rendering yourself, and serve the result of it?

heavyset_go 5y ago

Google should do the same for blog spam pages that are laden with AdSense ads.

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amelius 5y ago

... but we're still measuring page load speed, and hey, AMP is still faster in most cases.

bvanderveen 5y ago

Here's a non-AMP site that works great: https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/ Speaking from experience, it loads lightning-fast even on an ancient Android device on nerfed 2G data roaming internationally. And the user experience can't be beaten. Make the web hypertext again!

ehsankia 5y ago
Great, you found one site that works great. Here's a million others that don't and take 10s+ to load on mobile. I'm not sure what your point is. The day every website out there makes fast and performant websites like the above without any stick or carrot, then you will have a point, but unfortunately we don't live in such a world.
- birdyrooster 5y ago
  I missed the source to a million others. I haven't noticed this problem. AMP always seemed like a solution in search of a problem.
aero-glide2 5y ago
Nice web design. Now talking about the headlines itself, each and every headline is about a negative news story. If you only read npr you would think the world is on flames.
- sellyme 5y ago
  Possibly this was not there when you looked at it, but right now as I view the third headline in the list is as follows: > Congress Passes Bill To Counter The Rise In Anti-Asian Hate Crimes ...which despite the negative language is definitely a positive news story.
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    Is it a positive story? Sounds it! But... aren’t hate crimes already illegal? Was there some Asian Exclusion that is being removed? Is this feel good legislation? Or is this also an example of “world on fire” narrative?

amcoastal 5y ago

Am I the only person who experiences longer load time on amp pages? I literally have to click the little paperclip at the top of an amp page to go to the regular one to load in like 50% of the time. Is it because I use Firefox or something?

willhinsa 5y ago

X to doubt

aww_dang 5y ago

I wish they would look at the bloat in some of their own services. Analytics would be a good place to start. The team(s) attempting to incentivize page speed in the SERPS often seem to be working at cross purposes to other Google projects.

Causality1 5y ago

Great. Next can they no longer get preferential treatment in Chrome Mobile? By that I mean the way they hijack and hide your browser bar and stop you from accessing the tab manager unless you scroll all the back to the top of the page.

contriban 5y ago

I hope newspapers actually look at the alternative though. Some websites are so poor that I preferred sharing the AMP page instead of the original page since the article was not readable on the latter. That’s right. It was so ad- and popup-infested that it was literally useless. AMP wasn’t cancer; The web itself is. Visit some non-major or local website and you’ll see they’re absolute rubbish, especially those that work on the web, like news agencies.

sharken 5y ago

To me AMP is a way of accessing news that would otherwise be blocked off. Other than that i have no real interest in AMP as an end-user.

amperion 5y ago

Yes, AMP is dead and welcome to Page experience which you can achieve through AMP cost effectively :D

amperion 5y ago

You fools AMP just evolved in to Page Experience wake the fuck up

amperion 5y ago

Page Experience is the new AMP

p-sharma 5y ago

Oh great, they now only abuse their dominant positions in 372 instead of 373 cases!

from 5y ago

Reading HN threads about AMP has taught me that it's very easy for people with gigabit internet connections, fast computers and adblockers to ignore the fact that AMP made the web actually usable for large numbers of people who previously had to wait 5 minutes for a page to load.

watwut 5y ago
I use off-shelf android browser and old phone. I dont have gigabit internet connection. And hate AMP. Also, it is fair ty say that the people who hate consequences AMP the most are those who use reddit and discussions generally. Because that is where amp fails the most. Which is pretty close to average user. People who dont mind amp are the ones who primary use long form static pages ... which is minority of internet.
hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
I don't think that many people argue that page loading times weren't an issue, particularly when mobile networks were much slower. It's just that they think AMP was the wrong solution to that problem. There are other ways Google could have promoted and encouraged lightweight mobile friendly webpages without creating their own new standard.

mitchellst 5y ago

The coverage of this has, I think, been misleading. Google has not officially said (anywhere I can find) that AMP won’t get preferential treatment. They have only said that AMP won’t be required to rank. Those are very different statements. “Sure, we will include a few non amp stories,” is different from assurance that you will not be punished if you remove amp support from your site. The second one might be true— but Google hasn’t confirmed it.