> The change for non-AMP content to become eligible to appear in the mobile Top Stories feature in Search will also roll out in May 2021. Any page that meets the Google News content policies will be eligible and we will prioritize pages with great page experience, whether implemented using AMP or any other web technology, as we rank the results.
> In addition to the timing updates described above, we plan to test a visual indicator that highlights pages in search results that have great page experience.
Seems like a positive change. It will mean extra work as developers improve the performance of their sites. But having clear metrics to improve will make that work tractable. Also, advocating for that work to senior management will be easier when it's so clearly tied to SEO.
The upshot is that ordinary users will experience a more performant web. Not overnight but over a few years, like the shift to HTTPS and supporting mobile web versions. Both of those changes were driven in part by the desire for better ranking on Google.
the amp detractors have always said that we don't need amp because authors can just make their websites faster instead. here's the chance to see whether or not that's true.
news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings.
It is very true! Giants might move slower (as always) but most ad-powered websites have been working like headless chicken to get these metrics in the green.
Granted, it's hard so some may be satisfied with orange metrics.
But I've seen on all publisher-friendly communities I am in how much of an Earthquake the CWV Google Update has been, even if it is now pushed back.
Let's hope more and more follow that trend because nobody hate a fast-loading site with good content!
With AMP they just offload their concerns to Google, and I assume they will stay doing that. They have no alternative to their ridiculous ad-tech burderns so I can't see it changing.
But who this does help is websites who are capable of producing a fast experience and don't rely on a dozen ad-tech companies snippets, which will tend to be the smaller sites.
There is still an incentive for publishers. AMP typically showed lower CPMs on ads, and it is possible to have faster loading pages than AMP with ads. Just look at DotDash and their range of verticals.
It's fascinating to me as I moved away from Chrome on mobile specifically because amp caused me so many problems. The solution to page load failures was always editing the URL to give me the original which worked so much better.
Hear that Google? The experience was so bad that I changed browsers to avoid it.
This extension is also actually kinda interesting in that it embeds a small ___domain specific language [1] that's interpreted with a lex-style parser in JavaScript.
This can itself be a bit heavy on the CPU if a website uses it too judiciously!
> news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings.
Most news on the internet is plagiarized off of a few original sources at best and then redistributed on various sites and portals.
This is a devastating problem for a democratic society. For example, local reporting in the United States has been eroded to the extreme. When a society does not have a commitment to factuality, people become more susceptible to fake news (propaganda), conspiracy theories (such as QAnon), and tend to become more uneducated. Yes, it is true, education can be very easily undone, including in highly intelligent, well-educated individuals.
Facts do not come naturally, nor do they come out of “progress”, such as technological progress. Factuality requires hard work and a lot of money, and it requires reporters on the ground, including in foreign places, such as in the case of foreign correspondents. Unfortunately, the use of foreign correspondents for American news services, physically on the ground in foreign lands, has almost been completely eliminated.
The lack of foreign correspondents means that when a crisis abroad occurs, Americans often have to fill in the gaps and infer what is going on. This allows bad actors to take control.
Of course people do not like to hear the facts. They are hard to listen to and believe in, but they are healthy, especially for a democratic and free society. Of course they are healthy for you as an individual.
The Financial Times has excellent reporting with foreign correspondents located in various countries across the world. The Financial Times also has great tech reporting. In the 8 years that I have been a subscriber, I have only found myself disappointed while reading one single article reporting on tech. Also, of course, I subscribe to local newspapers too.
That reads as "we agreed to send some money", not "we agreed to delay ranking changes by 4 weeks". The latter is the interesting part, as it is incompatible with the reality of needing thousands of algorithm updates per year.
Edit: ah, there's now a provision for this:
> (ii) if the change relates to a matter of urgent public interest—no later than 48 hours after the change is made; and
Obviously Google search isn't going to give you an article about Oranges when you query for Apples, but when there's a ton of articles about Apples, having a website with better performance will rank higher. It's unclear how the knobs are tuned, Google's ranking algorithm definitely has a lot to it.
All that is a bit irrelevant, this whole thing is about the news carousel specifically, which is basically showing a bunch of articles in a carousel at the top of search results. Previously only AMP articles showed, now I'm guessing you need some minimum threshold of performance. Seems reasonable, you don't want really slow pages that would push away users.
>Google will eventually ban any big enough ad vendor tinkering too much with delayed loading.
Delayed/deferred loading is supposed to improve page performance metrics, not degrade them.
In light of this, I fail to see how you arrive at this conclusion after an article that essentially says that Google decided to de-prioritize AMP in search results and instead give top spots to well-performing websites regardless of whether they are AMP or not.
If anything, this move encourages delayed/deferred loading for all non-AMP websites, because that's one way to improve your website performance and get your search ranking higher.
Most of the junk at the bottom of the list combines hostile web development practices with criminal negligence of good journalism. If nobody ever visits sfgate.com again, that will be a benefit to humanity.
But despite its name, AMP isn't much help to improve your website's speed though, for instance the new Reddit website uses APM and isn't faster[1] than the old one by lighthouse's metric (and I find it significantly slower from a user's perspective).
Semi-unrelated trivia: Google lighthouse's own website is a disaster[3] by their own standards (with a score of 28), which I find pretty ironic.
> for instance the new Reddit website uses APM and isn't faster than the old one by lighthouse's metric
The AMP page will still load faster because it conforms to a spec which is known to be preload-safe. This means it can be served by services like search engines without any additional network activity, and with minimal layout calculations needed.
Ultimately that's what AMP was designed for. It's more than just a head-to-head speed comparison.
As a sidenote though, reddit's AMP implementation is horrendous for a dozen reasons. It's almost impossible to escape loading the real site, which is not at all within AMP's design guidelines.
> served by services like search engines without any additional network activity
You mean AMP pages egt preferntial treatment by Google, and all AMP-related Javascript (IIRC, almost 1 MB of it) is loaded the moment you search anything through Google.
When you hit an AMP page, that JS is already preloaded and, true, there's "no additional network activity".
I'd love for Google to serve my pages' Javascript as well when I search something, and get preferencial treatment, but alas.
> You mean AMP pages egt preferntial treatment by Google
Promoting pages in a carousel above-the-fold is preferential treatment. Preloading Amp pages however is not. This capability works with any implementation of an Amp Cache, including the one used by Microsoft's Bing.
Everyone always brings up Reddits shitty implementation whenever they want to complain about AMP. AMP was never made for the kind of content reddit serves, it's more for static content like news articles. Reddit's mobile web version is shit in all sorts of way, and it's clear that's intentional to push people towards the app. You can tell by the huge damn banners that show up every single time blocking the content, no matter how many times you dismiss them.
reddit lets you choose freely between various frontends, I only ever use old.reddit.com, there is also i.reddit.com which as far as I understand is an alternative mobile frontend.
But unfortunately almost all Google links, which is how I usually end up on the web version, lead to the amp version. On desktop I may have an extension to automatically switch to old, but on mobile it's quite annoying.
And I wanted to run something similar but for our own network of sites. (If so you can reach me on my email in profile). Have about 400 sites to access.
How is that data compiled? Just poking around, the worst site in the list (SFGate) seems to have gotten a "1" for performance every time it's been tested, but when I try checking the same link in lighthouse (mobile mode) it scores 55~60.
There is no one lighthouse number. The site is likely using their own scores that are based on (but not direct averages of) lighthouse. Perhaps they give a score of 1 to the lowest site and scale up.
We're talking about the numbers that show up in the results of a lighthouse "performance" test. The overall score, total blocking time, time to interactive, etc. The spreadsheet has columns for all those values, and it shows SFGate consistently getting a "1" as its overall score.
(It's "0.01" in the sheet, as I guess it considers the scores percentages.)
Or just Google's own products/services. They usually fail. Same with Apple, Microsoft, everyone. I don't like the "Core Web Vital" metric because it is possible to make your site load slower or in a non-pleasing way for users and improve your score.
I don't understand how this isn't a rehash of Google's PageSpeed push during early 2010s. I do remember having to do the same kind of procedure to get better SEO: measure against PageSpeed's metrics set and optimise the bad results.
This looks just the next step after PageSpeed and I have no idea why Google didn't push this before the whole debacle with AMP, such stupidity but expected nowadays from the tech giants...
In the 2010s, PageSpeed Insights' metrics compared to your site to how it could be if it was delivered optimally. Did you compress your images? Have you combined your CSS files? Are your static resources longcached? A huge site perfectly delivered would score high, while a tiny site sloppily delivered would score low. They represented how much room for improvement your site had if you didn't want to make deep changes.
Search was doing its own thing, and they didn't ever have any public speed metrics.
Core Web Vitals is a different approach: pages are compared to thresholds. A huge site perfectly delivered now likely scores lower than a tiny site sloppily delivered. (PageSpeed Insights now reports CWV metrics.) These are the kind of metrics you can use for search ranking, because they are about user experience instead of developer room for improvement (low-hanging fruit).
(I used to work on mod_pagespeed, which would automatically optimize sites, and I still work for Google. Speaking only for myself.)
Thanks for the clarification here, but I wanted to confirm that when you're talking "huge site" and "tiny site" that this referring to the overall page load size and not the number of pages on the site?
Some of the metrics they judge are things that AMP basically implements for you, and are a pain to implement otherwise.
Cumulative Layout Shift is one of those things. Content blocks on the page need to have a fixed height, not one that is dynamic (which might happen with lazy-loaded content).
For some use cases, conditionally loading content (one of those being ads) becomes difficult/impossible if you're using a third party system and can't render server side.
Yes! I can't wait till its gone altogether. The whole AMP experience from an end user, really sucked. Pick a reason, but nearly every article always has something broken, missing, or misrepresented. Fifty percent of the time I would either need to click the original link, or give up on the content.
I used to Google things on mobile and append `site:reddit.com` to filter out SEO-laden blogspam and zero in on the familiar confirmation bias of other reddit addicts. Then I had to tolerate the following antipattern of the modern web:
1. tap a Google search result link
2. tap the tiny "i" icon on the left side of the stupid AMP page header to display the actual URL of the page I'm trying to navigate to
3. tap the displayed URL itself in the AMP header
4. close reddit's "this looks better in the app!" bottom banner
5. scroll down and tap "VIEW ALL X COMMENTS"
So fast. So usable.
On the bright side, this rigmarole has really done wonders for my productivity because I've simply stopped bothering.
Even old.reddit.com, coming from a google search kinda sucks. Only top level comments, after a few comments there is a more comment button then a GIANT section for posts from the same subreddit, then finally the rest of the comments. You basically have to go to the nav bar and hit enter (to get the context of coming from a google search out of the site).
Very true.... I’ve suffered the exact same process for years. Step 2 is the worst, not sure why but sometimes it’s incredibly hard to tap the i button.
New reddit is is a very strange design. I always thought the way it hides comment threads as a link to a new page was just a mobile thing, but no, that’s the design.
The old site is so so much better. Trying to get to it from a google search is infuriating, especially if you are trying to view multiple results. Imagine doing the above steps 5 times for 5 different results!
To be fair, Reddit itself is mostly to blame for the UX hellhole it's become. AMP certainly doesn't help but they have made so many shortsighted decisions recently wrt app nags etc completely of their own accord in their ongoing weird push towards engagement/monetisation.
I wish people understood how much power and information apps installed on phones had compared to websites.
“Nudging” to install an app you use to collect a ton more data because you intentionally broke the website is fucking evil.
Maybe someone has a Reddit app that isn’t a data mining jerk. IDK. But if not, I still prefer to give no one extra data over just not giving it to Reddit.
On my iPhone I setup a shortcut that will take a reddit url and open it natively in Narwhal. It's very handy and I'm not a huge fan of the official reddit app.
The pre-amp world was also completely utterly terrible though.
Do you remember mobile news websites circa 2015? It was full of so much ad tech that if a site didn't make your phone hot and crash the browser the best experience you could possibly get would be a couple ad and email form click throughs, maybe a video fading in over the entire content like some trashy mobile app, followed by a scroll jack, a backbutton jacking, then more videos just magically appearing in between paragraphs pushing them apart like some kind of infestation, it was just utterly unusable.
The text that you were lucky enough to catch would quickly fly up and down the screen as more ads start rendering and load in at every div tag with multiple jingles and voice-overs for car insurance and refinancing playing out of your phone all at once. You think "well maybe I really don't care that much about what that diplomat said after all". It was a complete waste of time. They were almost all like this as if there was some secret competition among the news sites, like as if some coveted award was at stake for the craziest most unusable experience.
I do recall, but the problem is the of the list of prior-issues you present, half those issues still persist in AMP, minus motion/fading effects. There are still so many ads it bogs down; ads break up content; there are articles indicated as text but masquerading as videos surrounded by ads. Alot of AMP articles are simply a link telling you to continue to the full page! All seems like new forms of the same old.
I'm not sure how its even possible, but I encountered one page I swear hijacked the back button.
The back button hijacking is easy. You can "push" something into the "navigation stack" and then detect the "state change" of the back button. There's a few pretty simple ways to do this without magic.
The website you're thinking of that does it is slashdot, sorry for the bad news. It's long been merely a shadow of the past.
Amp initially didn't allow JavaScript. It had a bunch of restrictions.
I honestly think it was good people doing it for a good cause but then the corporate meat grinding machine had to process it and they turned it into a power play and data mining operation.
Once again, the solution is inescapable both for /. and the goog; take big money out of tech. Every significant computer revolution basically started on that premise. Time to roll it again. Consolidated power breeds incompetency.
Our most noble task in life is to make the necessary possible and then inevitable
I had been under the impression that part of the AMP ecosystem or whatever was to enforce those practices. Otherwise, what's even the point of AMP? If anyone can do anything we're just back to the junk web again
Until last year or so, Google intentionally gave a worse version of google search when using Firefox on Android. I installed a user-agent-spoofer to pretend to be Chrome, and I got the perfectly functioning page. But then I also got results including AMP links, so quickly disabled the extension and went back to the old ugly result page...
9 out of 10 times AMP pages in Firefox failed to be scrollable. Like the static/fixed top and bottom banner somehow screwed up scroll behavior.
Speaking from experience, it loads lightning-fast even on an ancient Android device on nerfed 2G data roaming internationally. And the user experience can't be beaten.
Wow, I didn't know this existed! It seems way nicer than the "full site", I think even your average user would probably agree. The "full site" feels like nothing but a downgrade, it doesn't really add anything useful.
Nice web design.
Now talking about the headlines itself, each and every headline is about a negative news story. If you only read npr you would think the world is on flames.
But... aren’t hate crimes already illegal? Was there some Asian Exclusion that is being removed? Is this feel good legislation? Or is this also an example of “world on fire” narrative?
Great, you found one site that works great. Here's a million others that don't and take 10s+ to load on mobile. I'm not sure what your point is.
The day every website out there makes fast and performant websites like the above without any stick or carrot, then you will have a point, but unfortunately we don't live in such a world.
I really really want this to be true. Unfortunately I can just see some ambitious PM picking this up again and trying to push it even harder. "The real reason the previous initiative failed to gain traction was insufficient market education."
"This would be great as part of our new AMP Messenger!" Jokes aside, I wonder how one could measure above-average PM performance without tying it to product launches.
>I wonder how one could measure above-average PM performance without tying it to product launches.
By understanding the circumstances and work of the people you're managing, so that you can subtract confounding factors and separate their influence from everything else. There is absolutely no substitute for that, but because it takes actual work and attention, businesses the world over have been trying to replace it with paper thin metrics since time immemorial.
As far as I can tell, Google have the power to essentially end web bloat at one stroke: introduce severe Google ranking penalties for bloated pages. Websites would soon get the message and cut down on bloat.
Presumably the reason Google doesn't do this is that they'd have to punish many of the most popular websites, which might be seen as damaging the quality of their search results (at least in the short term).
Google's ad/tracking code is generally measured in the tens of kilobytes. Compare that to e.g., the tens of megabytes that news sites routinely waste autoplaying videos on completely different stories to the one you clicked on.
Google clearly already knows whether a website is primarily a text-based site or a video-based site, as it displays the two differently in search results. If they immediately blacklisted any text-based site with autoplay video from ever appearing on the first page of search results it would cut about 50% of web bloat overnight.
Yeah they have competing interests when it comes to truly minimising unnecessary resource usage, but there's so much good that they could do without going anywhere near cutting into their own analytics.
> introduce severe Google ranking penalties for bloated pages
That's literally what they're doing with the AMP requirement change, no? Instead of giving priority to AMP pages, they're giving priority to any pages which have good performance.
> If you want higher rankings and more traffic from search engines, you need to optimize your site for a better, more performant and faster user experience.
But wasn't this how things were meant to work before AMP? Google search never had harsh enough penalties to seriously deter bloat, and I don't know that they're going to change that, they're just going to remove the preferential treatment for AMP.
AMP pages are incredibly bloated with all the ad assets that slowly load in. Media sites browsed with aggressive JavaScript blocking are significantly faster.
The biggest reason is that google doesn't provide the utility that each of these individual libraries brings to the table. Even if they did, there's nothing that says the total "omega tracking bundle" that you'd be downloading from Google would be any smaller than the aggregated total of these libraries. You'd definitely have fewer network requests but I'm not sure that would really move the needle as much as you'd want.
While there is probably a bit of overlap, many of the above tools have very different use cases. For example, chartbeat is commonly used more on the editorial side for writers to track article performance but imrworldwide is a subdomain own by Neilson that they use to serve their sdk which offers metrics for preroll video ads. Hotjar provides user heat maps but sail-horizon is part of sailthru and used for email marketing.
I interpreted this as the downside of competition in the ad network space. Similar to “why do we need 4 cell towers on the top of this building” or “why does Boston have so many hospitals”.
I don't think that users complaints actually had any impact. It seems more likely that avoiding regulatory scrutiny was G's motivation in scrapping AMP.
There are companies pushing the boundaries every day, with governments generally failing to even investigate unless there are enough complaints to raise attention.
Complaints by themselves depend only on shame, which most companies seem to avoid easily. Complaints that catch the attention of governments, on the other hand...
It was the wrong long-term solution for sure. But I think it forced publishers to reevaluate their priorities with respect to bloat and loading times, whereas prior attempts at quietly calling attention to the problem apparently didn't make a shred of difference...
When I remember getting BBS results faster... sigh.
while (true) {
Every available channel will fill with every available amount of content until the SNR gets so low that a different channel is created.
}
I agree, and whenever I bring up that web designers can do anything but wrong, I've been piled up on before.
I'd still take a mildly broken AMP page to read an article over the "intended experience" with ads and trackers everywhere and any attempts to block them would break the page further.
Agreed - all the claims that AMP sites are slower / more bloated then non-AMP sites seemed like total nonsense to me. Maybe HN folks with blocking capabilities - but average folks like my mom, AMP was the place to be.
I get the sense that the only reason this happened is because amp sites were returning less advertising revenue for sites implementing it vs regular web. If the money was the same or better then I can't assume it would have ended up this way.
Good riddance. A thinly veiled power grab to make the web a walled garden. Now lets do the obvious thing and just do preferential treatment for fast loading pages.
>> The Top Stories carousel feature on Google Search will be updated to include all news content. This means that using the AMP format is no longer required and that any page, irrespective of its Core Web Vitals score or page experience status, will be eligible to appear in the Top Stories carousel.
It doesn't say AMP will not get preferential treatment, it just says your page doesn't have to be using AMP. Don't forget Google has Web Stories[0] to fill this gap as well.
I hope newspapers actually look at the alternative though. Some websites are so poor that I preferred sharing the AMP page instead of the original page since the article was not readable on the latter. That’s right. It was so ad- and popup-infested that it was literally useless.
AMP wasn’t cancer; The web itself is. Visit some non-major or local website and you’ll see they’re absolute rubbish, especially those that work on the web, like news agencies.
Unfortunately, AMP has a lot of inertia. I just tried a bunch of different queries on Chrome/Android, and all the carousel entries still have the AMP lighting bolt.
Newspaper dev shops probably don't have the money to justify a standalone "get rid of AMP" project. So it will take a while to see some migration away.
Anyone have a query that results in a carousel story that isn't an AMP one?
Edit: Found one. "Biden Covid" results in an NPR story in the carousel that is not AMP.
Reading HN threads about AMP has taught me that it's very easy for people with gigabit internet connections, fast computers and adblockers to ignore the fact that AMP made the web actually usable for large numbers of people who previously had to wait 5 minutes for a page to load.
I use off-shelf android browser and old phone. I dont have gigabit internet connection. And hate AMP.
Also, it is fair ty say that the people who hate consequences AMP the most are those who use reddit and discussions generally. Because that is where amp fails the most. Which is pretty close to average user.
People who dont mind amp are the ones who primary use long form static pages ... which is minority of internet.
I don't think that many people argue that page loading times weren't an issue, particularly when mobile networks were much slower. It's just that they think AMP was the wrong solution to that problem. There are other ways Google could have promoted and encouraged lightweight mobile friendly webpages without creating their own new standard.
"Your site can be faster than AMP without using AMP"
That isn't true. Google is able to cache AMP pages in their CDN and preload and pre-render them in the browser or in Google News. You can't beat that with even the most optimized site.
AMP, especially on iOS, is awkward for many reasons and having to support two formats by publishers isn't great, but it is unquestionably fast when rendered within a container that supports AMP.
you can easily beat downloading hundreds of kilobytes of amp JS stuff from supa-fast and mega-optimized google CDN by not downloading JS at all or using js very conservatively
> That isn't true. Google is able to cache AMP pages in their CDN and preload and pre-render them in the browser or in Google News. You can't beat that with even the most optimized site.
Surely you can do that same pre-rendering yourself, and serve the result of it?
When you click an AMP result, your browser does not actually navigate away from Google's search result page. The search result page just dynamically updates its own DOM to show the AMP page content inline.
Depending on how confident they are that you are going to tap a given result, they can even preload the actual content and render it as hidden DOM so it can be displayed the moment you release your finger.
There is literally no possible way that a 'real' navigation (to a new page on a different ___domain) can compete with a simple DOM update.
Preloading the link can save a network roundtrip, but shouldn't the browser be able to do that (and parse and pre-render) as well?
Other than that, surely replacing the entire page content involves the same amount of work for the browser as rendering a fresh page.
I was talking about what’s possible for content creators to do on the web platform we have today, not whether it’s possible for browser vendors to make something AMP-like work at the browser level in future.
On your last sentence: no I don’t think so. There’s got to be some overhead in setting up a new JS/DOM environment, parsing the HTML and CSS, determining security constraints for the new ___domain name, stuff like that.
The time to first paint for a smallish website from across the planet seldom crosses the two-second mark. I would happily take that over a website that fails to load from a server <100 miles from me because my packet loss is >40%.
The coverage of this has, I think, been misleading. Google has not officially said (anywhere I can find) that AMP won’t get preferential treatment. They have only said that AMP won’t be required to rank. Those are very different statements. “Sure, we will include a few non amp stories,” is different from assurance that you will not be punished if you remove amp support from your site. The second one might be true— but Google hasn’t confirmed it.
Am I the only person who experiences longer load time on amp pages? I literally have to click the little paperclip at the top of an amp page to go to the regular one to load in like 50% of the time. Is it because I use Firefox or something?
Great. Next can they no longer get preferential treatment in Chrome Mobile? By that I mean the way they hijack and hide your browser bar and stop you from accessing the tab manager unless you scroll all the back to the top of the page.
- https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/introducing-web-vitals-ess... introduces these metrics, what they mean and how to measure them.
- https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating... talks about how the search engine experience will change
> The change for non-AMP content to become eligible to appear in the mobile Top Stories feature in Search will also roll out in May 2021. Any page that meets the Google News content policies will be eligible and we will prioritize pages with great page experience, whether implemented using AMP or any other web technology, as we rank the results.
> In addition to the timing updates described above, we plan to test a visual indicator that highlights pages in search results that have great page experience.
Seems like a positive change. It will mean extra work as developers improve the performance of their sites. But having clear metrics to improve will make that work tractable. Also, advocating for that work to senior management will be easier when it's so clearly tied to SEO.
The upshot is that ordinary users will experience a more performant web. Not overnight but over a few years, like the shift to HTTPS and supporting mobile web versions. Both of those changes were driven in part by the desire for better ranking on Google.