When I heard about AMP, I didn't get warm fuzzies. I didn't exactly know how or why, but something told me that the main benefactor with this technology was Google, not the user, and certainly not the content provider.
I can make pages faster without AMP by stripping the needless bloat and using a proper CDN. Why do I need this tech again, besides the artificial goad of page rank?
> I can make pages faster without AMP by stripping the needless bloat and using a proper CDN
You can. In theory. But people don't, as is evident with the web we have today.
So Google comes along and tries to force people to do it. AMP wouldn't exist if people would've optimized their webpages on their own.
For me, at least, it's being unable to load it in a background tab or copy the actual URL from the URL bar. It breaks the web.
Plus who needs to lose even more screen space to that stupid bar at the top plus the fact that the browser chrome doesn't hide itself when you scroll like it does on a normal page?
I haven't had a super awesome experience so far with it on my iPhone. I've seen a lot of results where I click on them and they spin forever, never loading. But if I long press and open the result in a new tab, it loads instantly and works fine.
Yep, in the short-term it's a good thing for users because it means they can access the content they are looking for more quickly in a consistent format.
In the long run, it might be bad for users, as it could result in media producing less valuable content, and one big company having more control over distribution.
Since I've searched for the content, these are not ads but real content that match my search query which site owners have asked Google to render. If, despite matching my search query, the content is not what I'm looking for, then it helps me as a user to know that sooner rather than later.
If you're willing to put in all the work to do it yourself, and also pay for CDN (though it probably won't be as good as Google's), then feel free to do it.
But yeah, nothing's free. They give you this great technology, free access to their world-wide CDN, and better organic search results, at the cost of having the X button going back to search.
Though I have no idea how the author things that the "X" button should go back to the home page honestly... You open an article, you close the article. If you want to go to the homepage, you click the top banner with the logo.
>I have no idea how the author thinks that the "X" button should go back to the home page honestly
He's not suggesting the "X" leads to the home[0] page, but to the actual "deeplink" page (blogpost, etc).
I'm not the author, but here's my idea:
Normal webpage: click result in Google, page loads (for a long time), I click reader view, read some, close reader view, explore the site.
AMP page: allows me to skip the loading time & the click on 'reader view' and start reading directly (so far, so good), but then I close "(AMP) reader view" and want to explore the site. Instead I am back at square one, exactly where Google wants me to be.
You hit the nail on the head. The cost to the publisher is added discoverablility of their other content and the ad revenue that comes from it (it also hits networks like Taboola hard).
Their success becomes ever more tied to Google for the next hit.
It's pretty straightforward to provide a link in the page content that goes to the non-AMP version of the page. Multiple other news sites already do this.
But why would you ever want as a user to go from an AMP article to the same article but non-AMP? I could see the user going to the homepage of that site to see more similar articles (or clicking on other articles on the side), but I don't see reason why they would want to see the exact same content but slowly loaded.
And again, definitely not by pressing X. Pressing X means you're done with the article. And if you're interested, you'd press the websites logo at the top to go home, not X.
I think it was a way for Google to get newspapers and other publishers to stop smothering themselves in ads. Google has been preaching the gospel of the fast web for years now as publishers add yet another box for an ad server to fill.
Then Facebook started to court publishers and suddenly the best way to read a lot of web content was inside of Facebook which is obviously terrible for Google. So Google came up with Amp as a way for publishers to provide the same experience on the web.
> but something told me that the main benefactor with this technology was Google
Yep, and that something was that it was an initiative by Google.
They are not a charity. They would not do this is it didn't benefit them (or inconvenience a competitor, though Google seem to err on the side of the former rather then aggressively going for the latter) in some way. The fact that is offers benefits for others is secondary, or at best has equal footing in their collective mind (many individuals within the company may be more altruistic individually, but the company as a single entity won't be).
I can make pages faster without AMP by stripping the needless bloat and using a proper CDN. Why do I need this tech again, besides the artificial goad of page rank?