Good news: Google no longer requires publishers to use the AMP format. Bad news: What replaces it might be worse
- Reference: 1624874472
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/06/28/google_amp_core_web_vitals/
- Source link:
This sounds like great news. As a [1]long-time critic of Google AMP , I wish I could say that Google AMP is over and done with, but I'm not convinced.
As I wrote years ago when it launched, Google's AMP is bad – bad in a potentially web-destroying way. It's bad for how the web is built, it's bad for publishers of credible online content, and it's bad for consumers of that content. Google AMP is only good for one party: Google.
is Google or AMP "evil"? I don't know. It doesn't matter. The people behind AMP might have had good intentions, they might not have. Google does not have to be "evil" for it to do things that harm the open web...
Unfortunately, the same can be said of Core Web Vitals.
And make no mistake, AMP format pages did not just disappear from the web. It's great that AMP is no longer required to get in Google's coveted Top News carousel, but that doesn't mean AMP is gone.
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Requiring publishers to use the AMP format for news is a moot point. All of the major purveyors of news already use AMP. Google doesn't need to require AMP because there's no one left to force into using it. Rolling back the AMP requirement isn't a sign of victory for the open web, it's a sign of defeat.
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The other problem is that if you were a publisher interested in dropping support for AMP, Google News isn't the only game to consider.
AMP links are widely used throughout other Google services, including Gmail, Google Images, and Google Search. Even though it's no longer required for Google News, around a month after Google's ranking changes took effect, almost every story currently in the Google News carousel is still using AMP.
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All of which is to say that Google AMP was forced on publishers and, given no choice, publishers embraced it – so don't expect it to go away now just because it's no longer required. Big media publishers are slow to adopt and even slower to abandon.
Unfortunately, I don't expect AMP links to disappear any time soon. You can always do the web a favour by installing a browser plugin to toss out the AMP URL and give you the link to the actual URL (I like [6]this one ). It's a pain, but if we want to keep the web as AMP-free as possible, we're all going to have to do a little work.
What's all the fuss?
Before I get into why AMP's replacement might be worse, it would help to back up and define what AMP is, because things have changed since it launched. AMP is now an open-source web component framework developed by the AMP Open Source Project. See Google anywhere in that sentence? No, no you don't. Google has distanced itself from AMP considerably over the years, but it hasn't given up control.
Google AMP began with the stated goal of speeding up the web. The logic behind AMP goes like this: web developers suck at making fast websites, let's strip out all the stuff people don't need and cache it on our super-fast servers. That sounds good. It's not hard to see how well-meaning people would get behind that idea. The problem is that being fast isn't what makes the web great. It's part of it, but it's not the most important part.
Another common defence of AMP you'll hear is that it's open source. This is true, but also a non sequitur. There is nothing inherently good about something being open source. As web developer [7]Ferdy Christant put it back in 2018 , the open source defence "isn't just a weak defense, it's no defense at all. I can open-source a plan for genocide. The term 'open source' is meaningless if the thing that is open source is harmful." Quite.
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Since we've now invoked something akin to [9]Godwin's Law , let's pause for a moment to address the question, is Google or AMP "evil"? I don't know. It doesn't matter. The people behind AMP might have had good intentions, they might not have. Google does not have to be "evil" for it to do things that harm the open web.
[10]Google to revive RSS support in Chrome for Android
[11]Google AMP gets a shock to its system as advisor quits, lawsuit claims foul play
[12]Brave takes brave stand against Google's plan to turn websites into ad-blocker-thwarting Web Bundles
[13]Google isn't even trying to not be creepy: 'Continuous Match Mode' in Assistant will listen to everything until it's disabled
Regardless of motivation, the fact remains that the AMP developers produced something that is bad for the open web ecosystem because it destroys three sacrosanct elements of the web: the URL, the open web standard of HTML, and the decentralisation of the web.
The URL is destroyed because when you visit an AMP page you visit a cached URL. Share that URL and the people who visit it will also visit the Google cache, not the publisher's URL. There is no web when that happens. There is just traffic coming to Google, which is good for... Google. To my mind this the biggest problem with AMP. The URL is the web. Literally. Without the URL you have nothing.
AMP doesn't stop there; it also strips out all kinds of perfect valid, approved-by-standards-bodies HTML. Programmers hate HTML. It's messy, vague, imprecise, and user agents must deal with that, which is a huge pain for programmers. It's a valid criticism in many ways, but it also misses the fact that these are exactly the qualities that have enabled millions of people to use HTML. It's messy, vague, imprecise, and perfect for creating the web. What's more, it is developed very slowly, by many people, representing many points of view, many needs. AMP is a set of programming guidelines shoved down your throat by Google.
The third problem with AMP is that it disrupts the web's decentralised design. This is really an outgrowth of the two things, but important in its own right when we start considering Google AMP's ostensible replacement, "Core Web Vitals."
Decentralisation means that no one entity controls web content. With AMP, Google gets total control of the content. Google hosts it, and Google alone knows who visits it.
The final point is either ironic or, if you lean towards conspiracy, proof that Google knows exactly what it's doing here – namely, locking up content where Google can control it and mine users for data. Are you ready for it? Google AMP pages aren't any faster than regular HTML pages. Worse, they're often slower. Nope, not kidding. When AMP pages are faster, it's because Google is pre-loading them, which Google could do for any page on the web.
Still, getting a spot in the Top News carousel of Google News is a powerful carrot, and it worked. Nearly every major publisher on the web (including this one) publishes AMP versions of their pages.
Now AMP is no longer required of publishers, those of us shouting about how this is bad can just shut up now, right?
Unfortunately, there are problems with AMP's replacement as well. And those problems go right back to what was wrong with AMP in the first place: Google is in charge of it.
As web developer Ethan Marcotte [14]points out : "While the shift to Core Web Vitals is a step in the right direction, it also means that Google alone determines what a 'great page experience' means."
Currently it [15]means your page should mostly load in 2.5 seconds. That's not a very high bar to be honest, but it is still a bar and the web does not do bars. Worse, that requirement might change tomorrow. Marcotte makes it clear that he thinks deprioritising AMP in favour of Core Web Vitals is a very good thing, but I'm not so sure that's true. Neither, it seems, is Marcotte, who goes on to note that Google has "taken its proprietary document format, and swapped it out for a proprietary set of performance statistics that has even less external oversight."
It's all about control
In the end AMP and Core Web Vitals boil down to a very simple reality: Google is again using its dominance in the search business to force everyone to play on its terms. Whether that's a proprietary markup language or some arbitrary set of performance standards, the end result is the same. Google is a monopoly and it is using its monopoly position to force the rest of the web into doing what it wants.
Google AMP and its successor are classic examples that could have been pulled from another monopoly's playbook: embrace, extend, and extinguish. The difference is that Google is being much more clever about how it extinguishes things than Microsoft ever was. Google embraced HTML, then extended it with AMP and now, in claiming to have extinguished AMP, it gets the control it wants without the bad press. The slight twist in the extinguish move is a nice touch, Google. Well played.
I've said it [16]before , I'll say it again. The power of the web lies in its decentralisation, it lies with its messiness, it lies with its edge nodes – that is, with you and me. We rejected AMP, it may be fading, but we need to keep rejecting. If we reject Core Web Vitals, it too will die. ®
Get our [17]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_google_amp_bad_bad_bad/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YNnyIMmjuwBQ1sd0daa87gAAANc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YNnyIMmjuwBQ1sd0daa87gAAANc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YNnyIMmjuwBQ1sd0daa87gAAANc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YNnyIMmjuwBQ1sd0daa87gAAANc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html
[7] https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the-missing-controversy-3b424031047
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YNnyIMmjuwBQ1sd0daa87gAAANc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/20/google_rss_chrome_android/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/19/google_amp_resignation/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/27/brave_webbundles_google/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/19/google_assistant_new_dev_tools_features/
[14] https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/au-revoir-mon-ampmour/
[15] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/page-experience#signals
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_google_amp_bad_bad_bad/
[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: AMP is not a problem, nor is its replacement
And how many of the manipulated public can spell URL, let alone know what it is or how it works, so no chance of them avoiding google.
Re: AMP is not a problem, nor is its replacement
Your solution is akin to:
"I take strong pain killers, so when they hit me I don't feel anything! It's all good!"
Re: AMP is not a problem, nor is its replacement
" If you do a little bit of research "
I think we've only just moved beyond "the internet is that little blue 'e' thingy", so what you suggest may be perfectly logical for people that read this, for the other 99.9% of humanity it's a different story.
Re: AMP is not a problem, nor is its replacement
Articles like this are useful because they explain it in detail so non technical people can have some understanding of what's happening. I have many intelligent friends who I could ask them what AMP is and they wouldn't have a clue. Likewise they wouldn't think to use a redirect add-on and probably wouldn't install it anyway. Even if they did next time the change whatever device they are using they wouldn't think to do it again. That's why you need to take the task of fixing it to the people doing it.
Well said
Well said! All of these (ever-changing) things that Google dreams up are just hoops for web developers to have to jump through, like performing dogs. I at least half wonder that they keep churning these things out to keep developers sufficiently busy bending to Google's will that nobody ever has time to stop and think, "Hmm, is there maybe a better, more neutral, way of doing this sort of thing, or even, is it actually really necessary…"?
How much time and effort will CMS developers (and custom site developers) have had to expend in order to add in support for AMP, and now how much time will have to be spent/wasted to support this latest "hot new thing"? Of course, it's more than likely that it too will be replaced be something newier and (allegedly) shinier after a couple of years? Here's a name they can have for free for the next incarnation: Advanced Dynamic Hypertext Documents, perhaps called ADHD for short (which seems to sum up their approach to many of their inventions all too well)?
Of course, much of the media is its own worst enemy, salivating over any and all news from Google. Perhaps the media (that part without sharp beaks, anyway) needs to remind its readers and listeners that diversity is a good thing: many other decent, and less evil, search engines exist, and so perhaps people should be encouraged to use them more, to get a less biased picture of the web, rather than only those sites that jump through the hoops to please Google's search results?
Re: Well said
If it wasn't Google, it would be someone else.
Let's go way back to the mid 90s, and what Microsoft was doing. Remember the Active Desktop? And the Channels that you could put on them? They were kind of like RSS feeds, but less well supported.
Let's imagine for a moment a world in which Microsoft got what it wanted. Your phone runs Windows CE/Mobile, just like everyone else in the world's does. Active Desktop and Channels weren't a glorious failure. Web sites all have Channels because that's what you have to do - if you don't, then Bing won't promote your content in its results.
Does anyone here want to say that the Channels spec won't be being fiddled about with by Microsoft in this scenario? That they won't be shipping "improvements" that mean work for everyone else?
I don't think this is anything but capitalism. Swap Google out for some other company, and the same thing would probably be happening.
The names of the players may change, but the play itself remains constant...
Re: The names of the players may change, but the play itself remains constant...
That's not a reason to just give up and stay silent and passive.
Re: Well said
"If it wasn't Google, it would be someone else."
Supposition, but I'll get back to that. For starters, so what? Because some other company would do the same thing, this means what? It's okay because you don't think we could avoid it? We should ban all companies because any of them would do it? What exactly are we supposed to do with your gloomy assumption that anyone would do the same, and it involves treating this real situation any differently, why should your assumption prevent us objecting to and taking action against Google?
Also, I don't think everybody would do the same. Not every company works the same way. Your example is one of them. 1990s-style Microsoft would, if it had a massive monopoly on everything, have several very negative things, but it probably wouldn't be so intent on monopolizing data. 1990s Microsoft was more in the business of monopolizing money, and they might think it's just fine to let people use servers as they were designed since they were getting all the money from people buying computers and phones. Or maybe I'm wrong, but you can't prove it any more than you can prove your idea. Not every company acts the same if given a monopoly position. You can usually guarantee that they will do something bad, but the specific bad thing depends on who is running the place and what their business plan is.
Re: Well said
If I don't do it someone else will is not a good argument for doing something. Logic like that votes for facists, leaving the EU and reality TV personalitlies that want to be President.
Anti-trust
The goal of AMP was to starve companies using ad providers other than Ad Sense.
It looks like Google got scared of incoming anti-trust lawsuits and preemptively killed AMP hoping the matter will be closed.
Another problem is that our regulators seem to be shy and feel intimidated when it comes to dealing with such companies. Maybe it's time to give them more powers?
At the end of the day, we don't want one stagnant big company, but thousands of small and medium businesses competing with each other.
They should be looking into splitting Google, Apple, Amazon and the likes.
Use Bing!
It works just fine. Really! I live a perfectly pleasant life, no negative long-term effects.
Re: Use Bing!
Apart from the utter, utter feeling of shame?
Re: Use Bing!
I use Bing translate over the Google equivalent. Both are crap, but in different ways.
-A.
Re: Use Bing!
Bing has come on a long way and for image search, I use it over Google* everytime. If anything use it because it's NOT Google.
*this includes proxied ones such as Start page.
Re: Use Bing!
If you have a specific fetish that you want to see images of, Bing beats Google hands down.
Re: Use Bing!
Yes, please give your search business to another Tech Titan! They need more users to abuse!
/s
DuckDuckGo is reasonable without the compromises of being tied to an abusive monopoly.
AMP is not a problem, nor is its replacement
As I read this article, the author is complaining that AMP redirects my click to a Google-cached page, and its successor does the same thing.
Except that I use ClearURLs. That is a Firefox addon that removes all extraneous, useless stuff from the link I want to click on.
So I have never been impacted by AMP. When I click on a link, ClearURLs ensures that I get to the page that was intended : the one on the website I wanted to visit, not Google's cached version of it.
The Internet remains the Internet. If you do a little bit of research, you can have the experience you want, not the experience other entities want for you.