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Web consultant Barry Adams has written a blog post about the problem with Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and how to fight against it being shoehorned into the WWW.
Let’s talk about Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP for short. AMP is a Google pet project that purports to be “an open-source initiative aiming to make the web better for all”. While there is a lot of emphasis on the official AMP site about its open source nature, the fact is that over 90% of contributions to this project come from Google employees, and it was initiated by Google. So let’s be real: AMP is a Google project.
Google is also the reason AMP sees any kind of adoption at all. Basically, Google has forced websites – specifically news publishers – to create AMP versions of their articles. For publishers, AMP is not optional; without AMP, a publisher’s articles will be extremely unlikely to appear in the Top Stories carousel on mobile search in Google.
And due to the popularity of mobile search compared to desktop search, visibility in Google’s mobile search results is a must for publishers that want to survive in this era of diminishing revenue and fierce online competition for eyeballs.
If publishers had a choice, they’d ignore AMP entirely. It already takes a lot of resources to keep a news site running smoothly and performing well. AMP adds the extra burden of creating separate AMP versions of articles, and keeping these articles compliant with the ever-evolving standard.
So AMP is being kept alive artificially. AMP survives not because of its merits as a project, but because Google forces websites to either adopt AMP or forego large amounts of potential traffic.
And Google is not satisfied with that. No, Google wants more from AMP. A lot more.
AMP is also purported to throw in an 8-second delay to punish those that do not toe the line.
Earlier on SN:
Google Attempting to Standardize Features of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) (2018)
Kill Google AMP Before It Kills the Web (2017)
(Score: 5, Informative) by PiMuNu on Saturday September 08 2018, @02:47PM (6 children)
Did you read the article? I think you rather missed the point.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by requerdanos on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:53PM (3 children)
I read the article. In addition to the article's introduction (substantially published above as TFS which I pointed out serious flaws with), Adams shows screen shots of a bunch of notifications that say "This will not affect your search ranking. This is a notification that your AMP page and the regular page differ in that (whatever)."
Then he says something along the lines of "You know what! I bet someday real soon Google is going to say, yes, informational notifications suddenly DO affect your search ranking! IT'S A CONSPIRACY! FIGHT BACK!"
In other words, after a rather inauspicious beginning, the article got factually and logically worse, not better.
My point from warning signs in the introduction was: Expect the article to get factually and logically worse, not better. Specifically, I said of his position, "That's just not a responsible position, and it removes credibility from that point on because you already know he isn't participating in the real, actual world at this point but some mental misunderstandingland." Reading further, you learn that he isn't participating in the real, actual world, and is making it up as he goes along. He offers screenshots as proof.
Here's the thing. "I say that a message that says one thing REALLY! MEANS! ANOTHER!" followed by "SEE? I can prove that the message I am ranting about EXISTS!" is just noise, not evidence. Maybe he's right--under the laws of random chance, there is at least an infinitesimal chance of that. He certainly doesn't present any indication that the chance will be higher than that.
No one who reads TFS here and then reads my comment above will be disappointed in the fact-free junk factor of the rest of TFA. That doesn't "miss" the point--it *is* the point.
If you are a paranoiac who is convinced that Google is conducting vast conspiracy--you might well be, and they might well be--then you will enjoy the article because it will reinforce your biases in an evidence-free, fact-free way proven to be enjoyed by paranoiacs worldwide.
If you suspect that Google is conducting a vast conspiracy and you're looking for evidence of that fact--you'll be disappointed.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Saturday September 08 2018, @09:04PM (2 children)
The content of the article, by my reading, was "if you adopt AMP, you are setting yourself up for an Embrace and Extend fail". It is a reasonable point. When adopting any 3rd party dependency, one must be very cautious to understand the risks implicit in that decision, and the costs involved in backing out of that dependency.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday September 08 2018, @10:51PM (1 child)
I quite agree. AMP is also practically self-extinguishing when you consider features like the required javascript blob and punitive artificial delays implemented via css if you try to get around its use.
TFA focused, however, on a fact-free rant about imagined slights. There's no need for this, as the real slights are bad enough.
As for sites that I manage, zero of them use AMP and all but one or two* are mobile-friendly by mobile-first design stylesheets that look great on mobile and even better on desktop/laptop.
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* one is a site someone else designed and I rescued from its archive.org backup and put back online for them, but they don't want to pay to do anything but just that. No mobile. Another is a site I designed several years ago that gets cute and "detects" traces of a mobile browser and uses a different (uglier) static table layout when it guesses that you are on mobile. All going forward use CSS that shows up well regardless of device and screen size. None going forward are likely to use AMP.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Sunday September 09 2018, @10:00AM
Fair enough - I read the (related) theregister article so it probably coloured my perspective. Sorry about that.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Saturday September 08 2018, @07:13PM (1 child)
FTFA :-
The GP post picked up on this point and I agree with him on it. Open source code is simply stuff that people other than those who wrote the code can read, and modify if they wish, and re-publish the modified version. It does not necessarily mean a project which has been originated by a small company or amateurs, nor one in which the work is spread around a large base, no matter how much that would give you a warmer feeling about it.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday September 10 2018, @01:58PM
But you have to look beyond the code and standards that they've actually released. AMP isn't just how you write an AMP website, it's also a set of standards for infrastructure to deliver that content. I can't find any open implementation of that infrastructure component though -- seems like the choices are either Google or Cloudflare.
It's the old EEE strategy. Google is already doing it with Android, and they're starting to do it to AMP as well, although they're probably waiting for increased marketshare to provide sufficient lock-in for the extinguish step. First they release AMP as an open system, then they get everyone using their own caching servers since it's their tech and their servers are free. Now their servers are starting to implement special proprietary features that they aren't part of competing servers -- if you check the pages about Google's AMP cache, you'll see sections which state "This is only applicable to the Google AMP cache". They've started to Extend and are preparing for Extinguish.