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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.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday March 13 2018, @09:17AM
AMP is supposed to speed up the web. Google could do this without a new non-standard language for web pages: all they have to do is make speed part of their ranking algorithm. (Important detail: they would have to ensure that they see the same page that users do.) Whatever the motivation for AMP is, it is solving the wrong problem. Anyway: AMP is not HTML, it is not standard. If this were Microsoft, we would all be saying "embrace, extend, extinguish", because that's exactly what it looks like.
A few sites have seen the light. I recently subscribed to Ars Technica, because they promise no ads and no trackers for subscribers; everything but the comments section works just fine without scripts. So, guess what, the site is fast without AMP. I subscribe to Soylent for the same reason.
The big, ad-laden, script-heavy sites? I sincerely hope most of them won't be around in another 5-10 years. Unfortunately, AMP will give them a new lease on life, with their broken business models.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.