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Google promises publishers an alternative to AMP
Google's AMP project is not uncontroversial. Users often love it because it makes mobile sites load almost instantly. Publishers often hate it because they feel like they are giving Google too much control in return for better placement on its search pages. Now Google proposes to bring some of the lessons it learned from AMP to the web as a whole. Ideally, this means that users will profit from Google's efforts and see faster non-AMP sites across the web (and not just in their search engines).
Publishers, however, will once again have to adopt a whole new set of standards for their sites, but with this, Google is also giving them a new path to be included in the increasingly important Top Stories carousel on its mobile search results pages.
"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," AMP tech lead Malte Ubl writes today. "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."
Also at Search Engine Land and The Verge.
Related: Kill Google AMP Before It Kills the Web
Google Acquires Relay Media to Convert Ordinary Web Pages to AMP Pages
Google Bringing Accelerated Mobile Pages to Email
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Tuesday March 13 2018, @02:28AM (12 children)
I haven't really taken the time to fully understand the fine points of the whole AMP thing, but have to say that it make me very, very uncomfortable. It seems like a bad idea to have the entire Internet filtered through Google.
I've been gently looking around for quite a while, thinking about how to replicate the good things about Google (passwords, history etc across multiple devices; web mail that you can use anywhere; spam filtering that is still the best; integration of mail, calendars, contacts etc (though it seems that Google craps out on those things of late)) but without being drawn into the whole Googleverse.
Shouting TURN OFF JAVASCRIPT! BLOCK EVERY AD EVERYWHERE! isn't really an answer. Like 98% of the population I will put usability and feature fullness ahead of near religious blocking of every element that I don't like. Ten years ago I might of jumped on that bandwagon, but I just want to get work done these days, and crippling two-thirds of the 'net doesn't really help me in that goal.
By the same token, I also ignore helpful people who tell me that I can increase battery life by turning off WIFI, GPS, data, notifications, and dimming the screen to 5% brightness. I didn't buy a smartphone just to turn off all of the things that make it "smart."
Someone somewhere will surely build a search engine or similar tool that doesn't fuck around with everything that you touch - point me at it and I'll use it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 13 2018, @02:32AM (4 children)
https://nextcloud.com/ [nextcloud.com]
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Tuesday March 13 2018, @06:10AM (2 children)
Have actually looked at that, as well as Mailpile
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Tuesday March 13 2018, @12:02PM (1 child)
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 13 2018, @01:55PM
You can get a keepass running on that nextcloud to address the passwords
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 13 2018, @10:58AM
I recently deployed nextcloud for a group of friends and they have found it very useful. Not only that, while I didn't intend to use it myself, I have found myself doing so.
Not heavy usage by any means, but definitely handy (and of course, being able to deploy your own server is great!).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 13 2018, @03:33AM
Fuck Beta and
Fuck AMP?
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday March 13 2018, @06:21AM (4 children)
Ferdy Christant wrote a blog post about many problems with AMP [ferdychristant.com]. There are four main ones plus the puzzling fact that the standard itself does not actually help speed things up:
However, AMP itself does not speed anything up, the pre-loading is what does it. It looks to me like a brazen maneuver to get Google in position to be cache for most of the world's web sites under the guise of speeding things up.
Fixing the web pages would solve that and reduce bandwidth overall. So the way around the problems AMP claims to solve is to keep pages lighweight [soylentnews.org] and avoid bloat. Bloat refers to any scripts at all but especially third-party scripts and third-party CSS.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Tuesday March 13 2018, @08:41AM (3 children)
Not mentioned in the article, but I believe that this preloading only works because they're hosted by Google and so the same-origin policy works. It wouldn't work with any other AMP cache and it wouldn't work for any other search engine. This seems like it's an antitrust lawsuit waiting to happen.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday March 13 2018, @05:13PM (1 child)
Would it be enough to boost sites' ranking if they 1. are lightweight and 2. opt into cross-origin requests (CORS) for origins under the major web search engines' domains?
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Tuesday March 13 2018, @07:42PM
Would it be enough to boost sites' ranking if they 1. are lightweight and 2. opt into cross-origin requests (CORS) for origins under the major web search engines' domains?
I would guess so. That's kind of what I had in mind but am far from both Google and what they work on. However, sites are generally quite eager to optimize their pages towards search engine rankings.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Tuesday March 13 2018, @07:40PM
This seems like it's an antitrust lawsuit waiting to happen.
Yes. In a parallel universe they'd get warned off just for even considering it, but it's most unlikely under the incumbent regime. Even since Bush II kicked out a federal judge [nytimes.com] to curry favor with Bill Gates and prevent breakup of M$ [politico.com], anti-trust rules in the US have been ignored. The effect spreads even to other regions outside the US. However, just in the US, you could see Larry Ellison testing the waters for Oracle with purchases and making more strategic purchases later. Here are four, the first (Innodb) heralded the eventual purchase of MySQL.
Then look at his additional acquisitions [networkworld.com] in the layers in the stack above that. Nothing in any of those purchases triggered even a warning. The Peoplesoft acquisition [ftc.gov] started in 2003 already. That leaves Oracle with little to no serious database competition, if the usual behavior continues that would combine with the holdings to be anticompetitive. IANAL
There was also more lately from M$ and from Apple that should have triggered some response too.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by isj on Tuesday March 13 2018, @01:28PM
It may not be useful to you yet, but there is https://www.findx.com [findx.com] We're currently focusing on crawling Danish sites so that is where the results are good. If you need French results then https://www.qwant.com/ [qwant.com] is OK (their non-French results seem to come from Bing).