I've been SEOing for 8 years now with endless debates with dev people about AMP. I pushed to have it simply because "if google says jump, you say how high".

There's a bunch of insane tactics with the Ads model. For example the Ads quality score which is a totally ambiguous rating out of 10. They will then rate the page based on a whole load of variables and determine the rating - if you get 4/10 you are going to be paying more for your bids due to being penalized for low-quality BUT they will still allow it.

Now trying to figure how to improve and get it up to 10/10 is an entire process in itself. There's going to be people coming out of the wood work saying that the Quality Score is easy and so on but to me is just smells of unfair practices to exploit each cent out of advertisers.

I am not hating on Google, just that I hate I have no alternatives but jumping the hoops Google puts out there.

Sometimes it seems the overwhelming sentiment at HN is that ads (especially targeted ones) are bad for the world. But it seems like nearly everyone is relying on them for their livelihood.

With Google there is no option. They set the rules, they own the game and I can’t spend these dollars anywhere else if wanted to. This creates an imbalance, both for Google itself and for customers (ad payers)

I mean, how many can knowingly risk loosing website from the front page if they don't use AMP or worse don't display Google Ads? How can a layman even know their website is being penalised for not doing those, whom can they complain to when anti-trust regulations are non-existant in other parts of the world and even if they exist monopolies tend to keep the bureaucrats/politicians well fed.

So yeah, HOOORAHHH! if you live in U.S.A.

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, and I'm friends with some of the people at the link. Speaking only for myself.)

Edit: I misread. Corrected below. Sorry!

Also worth noting that we should probably judge AMP as a whole product. What if it didn't make things faster at all, but did make them predictable and amenable to prerendering? The product is AMP+Cache+Prerendering. Prerendering unquestionably gives huge speed advantages in many scenarios. If you don't have AMP, you don't have prerendering, which means AMP-as-a-product gives significant speed advantages, since it's on the critical path to prerendering. (All of this is of course predicated on the idea that you can't practically prerender normal HTML pages, which perhaps you can, I don't know. I'm just saying if that justification for AMP is correct, it shouldn't necessarily matter that HTML+AMP markup is not faster than HTML markup.)

You just answered it yourself. If someone follows good habits already, then AMP isn’t faster for them (aside from Google not allowing non-AMP loads to start sooner).

Is that what I'm reading?

And yeah, it's a technical issue.

That's it. I'm putting a 1-second delay into my webserver right now, when it detects Google Chrome.

This whole AMP mess just shows how insidiously evil a HugeCorp can be through sheer system complexity. Was it intentional? Well, I guess court cases will show that, but sheesh... even if unintentional it's extremely chilling.

How about a pop-up telling the user that the UX of this website is better on Firefox? (which is true because e.g. it will not show the annoying pop-up)

Then don't add it for Googlebot User-Agents or IPs.

They'll drop content like a rotten egg from search results of they see a discrepancy.

If you and/or your organization can keep up with all of that... then good for you. That's not the reality for most of the world. And in "world", I include most IT organizations, btw.

EDIT: Btw, do note that I'm not even sure if the alleged issues/problems are even intentional or not... and that in itself is problematic... which was my larger point.

I don't have any solutions.

I don't think any single person can predict/know what's actually going on at this point.

Not handing them data for free would be a start (Analytics & Gmail)

Isn't it the CEO?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_quotes

The CEO can, in most cases, be removed at any time by the board and be replaced by someone else. Without the boards approval none of this can happen.

So if you need to blame someone. It’s the board of directors.

Google does a LOT of crap like that these days. Most people just aren't aware just how "evil" they've become, or prefer to defend them with nonsensical arguments like "see, Google still throws the Don't Be Evil motto somewhere at the very end of their multi-page work of conduct document, so technically they still believe in it!"

I believe this line of thought and justification was addressed for good in the Nuremberg Trials.

If you believe that people are responsible for their actions, and they have a choice of what to do, then just because someone gives them an order doesn't mean they have to follow it. They could refuse. If they accept they are then responsible for their own decision and its consequences.

It is not an excuse. What they did sets the nature of the penalty which may or may not even come out to being a substantial punishment. That they were told to do it, and knew it was wrong, but did it anyway merely fails to absolve them of guilt.

It was used prior, and has been used since, with outcomes ranging from being ignored to being absolved of all responsibility.

It comes down to the scope of the crime. If you helped murder 6 million people (apologies if that's not the correct number), "I was told to" is not an appropriate defense. If it's Karen's birthday and she's lactose intolerant, but your boss says to get an ice cream cake anyways, "I was told to" is a perfectly valid excuse.

Slowing down ads falls somewhere in between, but far closer to pissing off Karen's lactose intolerance than attempting genocide.

I always wonder this with things like the Volkswagen emissions cheating - how do those engineers rationalise it?

A nice fat paycheck will often be enough to quiet a lot of people's doubts. And if it still bothers them, they can make themselves feel better by donating some of the money to charity.

Also, people who do things they know are wrong can mollify their consciences by comparing themselves to people who do even worse, and then patting themselves on the back for not being as bad.

They think things like, "at least I'm not literally robbing anyone", and the robbers think, "at least I'm not physically hurting anyone", and those that hurt people think "at least I'm not killing anyone", and then killers think, "at least I'm not torturing anyone to death," and the torturers tend to have some excuse too, like doing it for the greater good.

Unless you are literally the worst of the worst there'll always be someone worse you could compare yourself to and think that at least you're better than them.

There are already some examples of this kind of justification in this very thread.

I see your point, and I agree. "In the end, it's better for the consumer this way, we're just giving the process the tiniest of nudges." has fueled a lot of anti-consumer hogwash over the years, I'm sure.

For an engineer the end justifies the means when it involves putting food on the table and ensuring there's a roof over your families head - whistle-blowing is not an option, and quitting mid-project is never a good look either.

Every time I hear this ... no. Google engineers could get a job elsewhere easily. It is not like software engineers would be like miners in dying industry struggling to survive. We are well paid and can get jobs easily.

I am not saying that everyone should leave Google. I am saying that if your company demands something unethical from you, rationalizing it through "ensuring there's a roof over your families head" is just lie for most of us.

I completely disagree. Have you noticed how much targeted advertising has sold out our world and affected peoples ability to rationally think?

No, it's the same as any other industry. A single company or negative behavior doesn't define everyone.

It's a race to the bottom, and someone has to code them there. It's bad.

It's a hill I'd be happy to die on. I feel like 6/10 engineers wouldn't care to have that fight, let alone risk their job over it. I'm lucky to be in a position that I am even able to. So many are not. Yet another example for the banality of evil.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/wait-wait-tell-me/

In this case they are using the same approach for HTML/JS ads on AMP pages, but if they know it's AMP they don't need to.

So I dunno - from an engineering point of view it seems pretty well justified to me.

Small sites don’t have the resources to support it, and are therefore at a major disadvantage compared to the big clickbait news factories, who of course have the resources to build entire second versions of their pages for AMP.

Meanwhile, if you don’t comply with Google’s AMP demands, you likely wont appear in the “articles for you,” suggestions every time you open chrome on mobile. Nor will you be featured in certain content carousels on Google search. This can amount to shutting off 30% or more of your traffic.

If Google wanted to make the web faster, they could have just tweaked the search algorithm to more heavily favor faster sites. Problem solved.

Google can only force the adoption of AMP because of their monopoly power. They claim it is an “open source” project but this is questionable. 90%+ of commits are Google employees. It’s not like “the community” designed it or has any power to change it.

I always cite AMP as the most cut and dry piece of evidence that Google is a harmful monopoly. I continue to be astonished that higher ups at Google ever greenlit the idea in the first place.

I love Google and what they’ve done for the internet, but it’s clear they need to be reigned in.

It also creates blank layers above the actual content.

However when you click an Amazon link, if it uses AMP, it usually opens google.com/amp/amazon.com meaning chrome doesn't know it has to open the Amazon app

Note: Amazon doesn't use AMP, just an example.

The claims in a lawsuit aren't doing their jobs if they don't seem damning.

> Also glad to see that google's preferring of amp sites in searches is going to get them in trouble

Presuming the outcome of a lawsuit from the fact that it was filed may be ill-advised.

I always thought that was the entire point.

AMP is Google solving for performance from itself, and costing a lot of time and effort for everyone else to deal with.

This means if you want AMP, you better switch to an AMP advertising network. Who makes AMP advertising networks and also gets to make the rules about amp.js that changes behaviour, and adds in arbitrary restrictions (like a 8 second blank page if you block Google's tracking javascript) at will?

This should be criminal, if it isn't.

> It looks to me like the design for this was https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133

To be clear, I'm not defending Google here, but I just want to point out that it's possible to be "evil" (for whatever that means) without being malicious. That is, I don't think any Google engineer was thinking "Haha! We'll slow down all those non-AMP ads deliberately!" The thinking seems to have been "We want to be somewhat 'backwards compatible' to allow non-AMP ads, but we don't want those ads to kill AMP's performance benefits, so we'll still load them but only after the AMP content has loaded and rendered."

However, this is exactly the mindset that I hate about AMP, and it drives me a little nuts when I see Googlers defending it. I get that your intentions are good, but don't you realize that it's not an accident that the primary beneficiary of AMP is Google, e.g. by keeping users in the SERP instead of going off to sites where the content is hosted, and by making everything ideal for the ad network you own? Googlers have to come to realize that essentially all of their engineering decisions are constrained by what makes more money for Google, not what is best for users. Sure, faster page loads are great, but do you honestly think Google would have supported a tech that made page loads faster ig it didn't cause people to look at more Google ads? I mean, if Google really supported what was best for users, they'd support more privacy controls a la what is coming in iOS Safari, but of course they don't because that's bad for their business.

I hate AMP and hope it dies, but I don't hate it because I think there aren't some user benefits to it, I hate it because it is a further attempt by a single company to own even more of the Internet.

It requires some pretty absurd mental calisthenics to be able to see AMP as an upgrade on the open web.

The fact that google does not let you disable AMP from your browsing experience is part of AMP, and open for criticism.

The fact that google will prefer AMP over non-AMP links even if this means looking for a newly launch site with dynamic content (that can't be amp'ed) will get buried by articles about that site because they have AMP, is part of AMP, and open for criticism.

ie: AMP the """standard""" may be good, but everything google did with AMP is fucking horrible, and utterly and irreparably stains AMP, if only for enabling these things.

And the fact that google benefits from AMP, AND also started AMP and shaped AMP, just kinda nails the argument that you can't seperate out AMP from how google uses AMP.

If they turned it off tomorrow the standard would still exist.

It never was more than a way to grab traffic, market and money share.

My guess it's related to the page rank algorithm.

See comment by jefftk. Seems to explain it.