[superkuh]

Higher rankings and google will preload the amp page they have and their servers for the amp link. That's why it is a tiny bit faster. It has nothing to do with the amp spec itself. It's faster because google is abusing it's monopoly search position to pre-load.

[shawnz]

I think the idea is that preloading wouldn't be feasible with arbitrary unrestricted HTML because of security concerns, which is why they created this restricted subset in the first place.

[lern_too_spel]

> google is abusing it's monopoly search position to pre-load.

How is that abusing their monopoly search position? Abusing their monopoly search position would be making publishers integrate directly with them to enable preload, like Apple News. Instead, they ask publishers to serve documents that can safely be prerendered, and all their competitors get to (and do!) consume those documents as well to enable safe prerendering from their own sites.

[stephenr]

Without their monopoly search position no one would be forced to adopt amp and further strengthen said monopoly position.

[lern_too_spel]

> Without their monopoly search position no one would be forced to adopt amp

It is used by the major search engines in every major market, so yes, they would be forced to adopt AMP. Compare to Apple News, which gives the publisher even less control.

Once again, how is it abusing their monopoly position if all their competitors get to benefit from it for free?

Finally, how do you propose to enable safe prerendering on the web that you would be fine with? RSS enables the same thing but takes even more control away from the publisher, but you're presumably fine with that. Not a single person in all these AMP rant articles that pollute HN has ever proposed an alternative, with 99% of the ranters, including this one, not even understanding the basic fact that prerendering is the thing that AMP enables.

[saagarjha]

I don’t want prerendering if it comes with this attached to it. Fast pages don’t need prerendering.

[lern_too_spel]

Tell that to Apple, Facebook, and RSS aggregators, all of which do the same thing but worse. Whether or not you want it, I and apparently most other users do want it.

[saagarjha]

As has been mentioned before, what Apple, Facebook, and RSS aggregators are doing is quite different than what Google is: they're not purporting to be search engines.

[squiggleblaz]

Why does safe prerendering need to break URLs? Why can't the pages be safely prerendered client side?

[lern_too_spel]

> Why does safe prerendering need to break URLs?

Think about how you would implement safe prerendering. Can you come up with any option where the link aggregator doesn't host the page? There's your answer.

[joshuamorton]

How does amp strengthen a monopoly position?

[RonanTheGrey]

"Use AMP or your site will not be present in mobile search results" doesn't seem like monopolistic practices to you?

[joshuamorton]

A priori not anymore so than otherwise downranking slow sites. The missing piece here is how using amp is beneficial to Google or harmful to consumers/other search engines to make it anticompetative.

[bscphil]

> how using amp is beneficial to Google

You are correct, most people are leaving this out. I think an emphasis on asking why Google is pushing AMP, and whether that interest aligns with consumers, would be helpful in this thread.

[stephenr]

It strengthens googles control over the web.

[joshuamorton]

In what way though? Like that's super generic and not particularly meaningful without a more concrete explanation.

[TheOtherHobbes]

No, there's nothing like super generic about it.

Google has a de facto monopoly on site rankings, which gives it de facto editorial control over the content of the Internet down to a very fine level.

If Google decides to drop a site from search, that site loses traffic and is effectively removed from visibility.

This is not a user choice. Users do not to get to say "Well, that site is too slow for me, so I won't visit it again. And actually I don't like the content either."

It's not a site owner choice. Owners can't respond to user preferences by improving performance or offering different content.

It's a Google choice. And the reasons for Google's choices are typically opaque, largely unstated, and never negotiated directly with site owners.

It's absolutely unacceptable for a single unaccountable corporation to have this level level of control over global information infrastructure.

In fact the whole idea of generic but opaque site ranking is toxic to an open Internet, and always has been. The idea that page rank has some kind of objective user value - as opposed to monopoly value - has always been debatable.

It was tolerable conceit in the days of Alta Vista when search was a research project, and some level of good faith was assumed.

But Google has trashed that good faith by operating like a bad actor - and monopolist - in numerous ways, AMP being the most recent example.

So no - not generic. Not even close.

[underdown]

Traffic never leaving Google's servers seems pretty concrete.

[saagarjha]

Apple isn’t running a dominant search engine that upranks Apple News results.

[lern_too_spel]

You're right. Apple is worse. They show only Apple News results.

[squiggleblaz]

But there's a difference between having a service which only shows your stuff, and having a service which apparently shows the entire internet, but subtly prefers your stuff. Most people find the latter far more questionable than the former, because if we want to find anything, we need to know where to look.

[lern_too_spel]

> but subtly prefers your stuff.

It prefers instant loading pages because that's what users want. If not, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Yahoo, or any of the other search engines that also use AMP would simply rank differently to beat Google.

[lillecarl]

The things that's being discussed though is that even if your page loads in "no time" AMP will be perfered anyways, even if your page loads fast enough that the user wont notice a difference.