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Comment by slackingoff2017 | Hacker News Reader

slackingoff2017

If AMP was so innocent Google would give users an easy way to disable it. It seems trivial to do, the fact that it's not in V1 says to me that there's ulterior motives.

There's more reason Google wants you to use AMP than "it makes the web faster!". That's just the sell. They REALLY want you to use it, enough that they don't want you turn it off. Maybe something to do with protecting ad revenue?

I heard that AMP was developed by people connected to the search team. And search team is probably another name for "AdWords cash cow team"

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Ulterior motive? Thought it was pretty obvious, shitty mobile page performance pushes people towards using ad blockers, which is obviously bad news for google. Most people don't mind basic, non-intrusive ads so much, which is what AMP retains.

Why not just punish slow sites? It would have been a lot easier than the zillion hours spent building AMP and the caching system.

Because that would not achieve the actual goal: to get people to stay on Google's properties, preferably without an ad blocker installed.

Note how over time more and more of the things that Google used to simply point to are served by Google directly. AMP is just another element in that strategy.

Interesting because actually it was AMP that pushed me out of Google properties, to Firefox for Android with uBlock and DuckDuckGo and I'm planning to stay using this setup even though Google's engine is better (minus AMP).

I'm not part of google, but they had been doing that for years, and still nobody was working on speeding up their sites.

Also, if every site slows down, the fastest ones ares still slower than before.

There was a previous discussion on HN that helped me understand the value of Google being "the bad cop" and making AMP restrictive. Before AMP, you'd have product people and ads people demanding to add all these bullshit ads and trackers to pages. Engineers would often try to push back with the performance argument, but it was a difficult argument to win (ads people could argue, "well, it doesn't really slow down the pages that much, and look at this revenue we get - maybe you just are coding it wrong when you're including the ads code!") With AMP, the discussion is very simple: "Sorry ads guy, I can't add your bullshit ad network JavaScript because it's not possible with AMP. You know Google favors AMP now, don't you, and you wouldn't want to be the guy responsible for a shitty SEO position because we didn't use AMP, do you?"

This hypothesis of "what's in it for google" bends over backwards ascribe altruistic motive, and also relies on the (deeply alarming!) idea that AMP use leads to better search rankings.

It's worth noting that since your comment was made, the idea "AMP use leads to better search rankings" is now directly contradicted by the TL of AMP (cramforce)[1] in a comment this thread [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15086192

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15087277

I should clarify: regardless of whether or not it is used in search "rankings", Google search results clearly consist of an AMP carousel high on the page for many searches, so it's kind of silly to argue that AMP doesn't affect "rankings", as it's patently obvious that it affects where results can show up on a search results page.

Also, FWIW, I don't have any issue with AMP as a technology, but I have a big issue with how AMP cache is used by Google.

That's the irony of all of this. Cramforce is claiming AMP isn't used for rankings but that is disingenuous. AMP pages are clearly featured in the carousel, and Google has gone on record saying page speed is a factor.

So AMP at the very least indirectly impacts rankings (and thus impacts rankings), and it may directly impact the ability to appear in the carousel (which impacts rankings).

Would love for him to refute this, but I suspect that won't happen.

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