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There's been a good deal of ongoing discussion about Google AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages.
Quite a few high-profile web developers have this year weighted in with criticism and some, following a Google conference dedicated to AMP, have cautioned users about diving in with both feet.
These, in my view, don't go far enough in stating the problem and I feel this needs to be said very clearly: Google's AMP is bad – bad in a potentially web-destroying way. Google AMP is bad news for how the web is built, it's bad news for publishers of credible online content, and it's bad news for consumers of that content. Google AMP is only good for one party: Google. Google, and possibly, purveyors of fake news.
[...] What it is, is a way for Google to obfuscate your website, usurp your content and remove any lingering notions of personal credibility from the web.
If that appeals to you, here's what you need to do. First, get rid of all your HTML and render your content in a subset of HTML that Google has approved along with a few tags it invented. Because what do those pesky standards boards know? Trust Google, it knows what it's doing. And if you don't, consider yourself not part of the future of search results.
Why a subset of HTML you ask? Well, mostly because web developers suck at their jobs and have loaded the web with a ton of JavaScript no one wants. Can't fault Google for wanting to change that. That part I can support. The less JavaScript the better.
So far AMP actually sounds appealing. Except that, hilariously, to create an AMP page you have to load a, wait for it, yes a JavaScript file from Google. Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski already recreated the Google AMP demo page without the Google AMP JavaScript and, unsurprisingly, it's faster than Google's version.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Pino P on Thursday May 25 2017, @02:55PM (3 children)
And watch your visitors dry up once the most popular search engines and news aggregators are boosting the visibility of AMP documents [searchengineland.com] over plain HTML documents.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Thursday May 25 2017, @08:32PM (2 children)
That will only happen if there's considerable jumping on the bandwagon. If they try that without a general acceptance, their own search results will drop in quality by a huge amount, because the majority of the worthwhile pages won't be in those results. Known as "Shooting self in foot." You think they'll go for that?
You're putting the egg before the chicken. Or something like that. Google wants this. You don't have to do this. No one has to do this. The only reason this would turn into a major screwup is if people follow Google down this rabbit hole. So it, in a small way, is up to you. Are you going to adopt these rogue tags and split the web into Googly and non-Googly for Google?
Me... no, I'm not. Screw those guys, I'm going home. As Cartman might put it.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday May 26 2017, @04:55AM (1 child)
Which there is. A quick web search for amp adoption shows articles about news sites finding AMP pages' increased visibility in Google Search effective in acquiring new viewers [venturebeat.com].
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday May 26 2017, @10:24PM
Code a html to AMP converter. Such that search engine will index these and then users will end up on normal html pages. Chrome is the component to watch out for.