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posted by martyb on Monday March 12 2018, @11:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the embrace,-extend... dept.

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


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday March 13 2018, @06:21AM (4 children)

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 13 2018, @06:21AM (#651707) Journal

    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:

    1. a new web “standard”
    2. loss of sovereignty of your website
    3. loss of diversity
    4. performance

    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.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Tuesday March 13 2018, @08:41AM (3 children)

    by TheRaven (270) on Tuesday March 13 2018, @08:41AM (#651736) Journal
    It's not clear what you meant by pre-loading, so I had to read the linked article. It appears that Google search pages will pre-load AMP pages, but not others, so people using Google Search will see AMP pages load faster. The down side of this preloading is that it will increase your bandwidth usage, which is important on the kind of device where AMP is being pushed, where most users have a fixed allowance. The best way to fight AMP is therefore probably to tell people that AMP pushes up their mobile Internet costs.

    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.

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    • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday March 13 2018, @05:13PM (1 child)

      by Pino P (4721) on Tuesday March 13 2018, @05:13PM (#651886) Journal

      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.

      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

        by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 13 2018, @07:42PM (#651951) Journal

        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.

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    • (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Tuesday March 13 2018, @07:40PM

      by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 13 2018, @07:40PM (#651948) Journal

      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.

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