Airbnb is putting AMP at the core of its digital strategy

(medium.com)

115 points | by cpeterso 2227 days ago

14 comments

  • untog 2227 days ago
    Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.

    The reason to use AMP is SEO. If you want literally any benefit other than SEO, just improve the performance on your own mobile site. Then you won't have to jump through weird hoops and come up with entirely new "magic carpet" user flows, because you'll actually control your own content on your own site.

    The talk attached to this Medium piece was given at "TechSEO Boost", but the article itself dances around ever using the term. So we're left to wonder why AirBnb is very worried about being able to link users to their native app, while they apparently don't care at all about whether users are using their web site. It's because of SEO.

    > the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, which has some powerful backers including Google

    > It would be fair to say that Google has been a very vocal supporter of the initiative from day one.

    These are really weird ways of describing a Google-owned, Google-pushed initiative.

    • callahad 2227 days ago
      In a large enough organization, improving site performance is hard, as you have to win political battles against your marketing / bizdev teams, denying them the analytics packages they want in the name of performance.

      "We could do that, but then we'd lose the special AMP placement on Google SERPs" is a much more compelling argument, and preferable to starting a proxy war between the CMO and the CTO.

      Google has done a hell of a job flexing their Search muscles to encourage the behavior they want, here. All the while somehow open-washing the project so that SEO-types make the ridiculous statements you quoted, implying that AMP isn't a Google owned-and-run project.

      On an engineering level, I respect AMP. From an anti-competitive / social engineering perspective, it's absolutely terrifying.

      • lern_too_spel 2227 days ago
        Why is it absolutely terrifying or anticompetitive? Microsoft implements its own AMP cache and has decided to use similar presentation for its AMP results. Baidu and Yahoo! Japan, both dominant in their own markets, also implement AMP caches.
        • jakecopp 2227 days ago
          Could you elaborate on this, I'm interested? It is Google's AMP spec or their own version?
          • Itaxpica 2227 days ago
            The AMP spec, as written, allows anyone to host an AMP cache and serve AMP pages. Google’s is the biggest and the one you reach through Google search so people tend to assume it’s the only one, but Cloudflare runs one as well, along with the ones mentioned in the parent comment.

            For more details, you can read the (very readable) AMP docs: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/how_cached

      • underwater 2227 days ago
        AMP has a whole suite of technical limitations that are unrelated to the problem being solved. For example they limit pages to 50k (pre-gzip) of unlined CSS rather than allowing stylesheets to be linked. This is not how sites are generally built, and at least for me, meant rebuilding large parts of my build process.

        Google engineers seem to have a hard time differentiating between a platform and a framework. PWAs and suffer from the exact same problem. They’re great if you build a greenfield product to their exact specs, but difficult to use otherwise.

        • dragonwriter 2227 days ago
          > AMP has a whole suite of technical limitations that are unrelated to the problem being solved. For example they limit pages to 50k (pre-gzip) of unlined CSS rather than allowing stylesheets to be linked.

          How is limiting size and server round-trips of CSS not related to the problem being solved by AMP?

          • SahAssar 2227 days ago
            Because that's a problem that should be solved with HTTP2 push, not with inlining.
            • fooker 2227 days ago
              Why can AMP pages not use that? This seems like an orthogonal issue.
              • SahAssar 2225 days ago
                They can, but instead they do it the wrong way.
        • fooker 2227 days ago
          >'how sites are built'

          I take a look at the average mobile web page and thank Google that AMP brings sone restrictions.

          • underwater 2227 days ago
            Then why pretend that it’s still just a web page? Google might as well drop the charade and push an proprietary binary format.
            • Spivak 2227 days ago
              Because becoming essentially Chrome only is the antithesis of their core business model of getting as many eyeballs as possible. Not particularly good for the web either.

              From a technical standpoint it wouldn't surprise me if people start proposing binary formats that beat text/plain + gzip in size and speed.

              • fooker 2227 days ago
                >From a technical standpoint it wouldn't surprise me if people start proposing binary formats that beat text/plain + gzip in size and speed.

                Webassembly

              • hrktb 2227 days ago
                protocol buffer ?
            • realusername 2227 days ago
              > Google might as well drop the charade and push an proprietary binary format.

              That's exactly what they are doing with Instant Apps, they just try different strategies to control the web more at the same time.

      • donohoe 2227 days ago
        Yes - if you have ad networks to deal with.

        Airbnb really doesn’t.

    • tyingq 2227 days ago
      The "SEO" benefit comes at a big price. You give up the reddest part of your page's heatmap to a 3rd party with often conflicting objectives.

      There's many downsides, but, for example...Google carousel results inject JavaScript that allows the end customer to left or right swipe right to a competitor...if you choose the AMP path.

      I'm not clear on why Google doesn't give control of the top banner to publishers.

    • baddox 2227 days ago
      Doesn’t implementing AMP give you both the SEO benefit and the performance benefit?
    • hammock 2227 days ago
      Unless it's AMP for email, which is more like a set of rich features for Gmail recipients
    • toomuchtodo 2227 days ago
      > The reason to use AMP is SEO. If you want literally any benefit other than SEO, just improve the performance on your own mobile site.

      It's a growth hack to get better organic search traffic, with user experience performance improvements a secondary concern.

      • untog 2227 days ago
        My point is that you wouldn't know it from the article. It makes it sound like you should implement AMP for user experience and fast loading, despite then going on to detail the ways in which it compromises user experience.

        When a big company like Airbnb jumps on a technology bandwagon people notice, and write-ups like this influence the choices other organisations make. They could at least just be upfront about the reasons why they're doing it.

        • ocdtrekkie 2227 days ago
          The reason Airbnb is not likely to be upfront about why they're doing it, is it's very unlikely that Airbnb wants to admit they're probably being paid for it or getting some other form of special consideration for writing this.

          The search benefit isn't even a long-term one: Either AMP will go away for some reason at some point, or, if the status quo is maintained, everyone will be forced to use AMP by Google's search monopoly, rendering it a null benefit to your rankings as everyone else transitions to it.

          • trg2 2227 days ago
            I think Airbnb should throw away everything they've done to date and hire all the Hacker News commenters to run their strategy instead.

            > it's very unlikely that Airbnb wants to admit they're probably being paid for it or getting some other form of special consideration for writing this.

            It doesn't look like anyone from Airbnb wrote this. But you're right, that's a good strategy - instead of the accommodation and experiences thing, they should implement AMP and get paid by Google for it. That's how business works: https://i.imgur.com/Vd6gI7X.jpg?1h

            Congratulations Brian and Gil on implementing this!

          • slig 2227 days ago
            > The search benefit isn't even a long-term one: Either AMP will go away for some reason at some point, or, if the status quo is maintained, everyone will be forced to use AMP by Google's search monopoly, rendering it a null benefit to your rankings as everyone else transitions to it.

            Maybe in the long term, but meanwhile they get the benefits for being early adopters. If AMP fails, they will simply roll back.

        • Spivak 2227 days ago
          Unless you're the 1% of websites you probably should implement AMP if you want fast loading (from search or news aggregators at least) because nothing is going to beat cached content loaded inline.
  • JoshMnem 2227 days ago
    It's a terrible idea. AMP is a shameful attack on the open WWW.

    AMP is slower than hand-optimized HTML.

    AMP pages are often hosted on a 3rd party domain, even sending the wrong referrers to other sites.

    AMP is also extremely slow on desktop browsers that have certain ad-blockers installed. If 3rd party scripts don't load, the user gets a blank page for 8 seconds. (Try it if you don't believe me.)

    • Spivak 2227 days ago
      * But it's faster than HTML that people use in practice.

      * Sure, but do you really care that users are using your physical servers or just that the content is out there? It's a trade that I think a lot of businesses would be happy to make. Who wouldn't want essentially free hosting complete with ad revenue?

      * Do you think ad funded sites care about people who have a worse user experience with an ad blocker.

      I don't disagree that AMP is bad for the open web, but it's not bad for the people publishing with it.

      • AlexandrB 2227 days ago
        > I don't disagree that AMP is bad for the open web, but it's not bad for the people publishing with it.

        I heard the same thing said about Medium and Facebook News. Whatever happened to "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me".

      • JoshMnem 2227 days ago
        If someone is going to implement AMP templates they have the ability to implement better HTML in the templates instead.

        It does matter that users are on your physical servers. It affects referrers and copied/pasted links, which affect brand recognition and SEO. Using AMP also puts a giant back button on your site that takes users back to the search engine results rather than deeper into your site. Many people do not want that.

        I don't think that airbnb is an ad-funded site. Even if it were, do ad-funded sites really want a 3rd party dictating how they monetize their sites? If so, I doubt that they are thinking through it all the way and considering the long-term effects.

        • canadianwriter 2227 days ago
          "If someone is going to implement AMP templates they have the ability to implement better HTML in the templates instead."

          Not someone. A corporation. Think bigger companies, not tiny one person sites. Just because it's possible doesn't mean they can win the sprint cycle.

          • JoshMnem 2227 days ago
            How would writing a whole new UI in AMP be easier than cleaning up the current HTML templates or writing new templates in HTML rather than AMP?
      • vanadium 2227 days ago
        Using 1.6/0.8 3G speeds (with 300ms RTT) as the baseline, and specifically targeting a 3s SpeedIndex embarrasses most non-AMP experiences by virtue of the AMP cache underlying the SERPs. These are the terms with which Google's marketing AMP specifically with its own tools for marketers. (To wit: https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-us)

        You can get damned close--and even exceed it if you're a minimalist--by throwing every bleeding-edge performance optimization under the sun at it, but nothing is going to stop marketers throwing Adobe's render-blocking VisitorAPI in the <head> to offset many of those optimizations, either. (Seriously, and you can't async it, either. Marketers get angry and Adobe doesn't support it.)

        The advantage of AMP dissipates rapidly as one tests in 4G and low-end cable speeds, however. At that point, hitting a 1s-2s SpeedIndex isn't terribly difficult if you're using front-end performance best practices, even with a framework bootstrapping itself to the DOM.

      • shard972 2227 days ago
        > * Do you think ad funded sites care about people who have a worse user experience with an ad blocker.

        Yep, because as that demographic becomes the majority they will then be forced to move from an ad funded model solely or perish.

    • rockdiesel 2227 days ago
      > AMP is also extremely slow on desktop browsers that have certain ad-blockers installed. If 3rd party scripts don't load, the user gets a blank page for 8 seconds. (Try it if you don't believe me.)

      AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. Being extremely slow on desktop browsers with certain ad-blockers seems like an edge case of the least importance.

      • JoshMnem 2227 days ago
        Extremely slow is an understatement. It's literally 8 seconds.

        Loading 3rd party JavaScript without restriction is extremely unsafe and not an edge case. It's basic Web-browsing safety.

        • rockdiesel 2227 days ago
          Is it shitty and unsafe? Yes, I'm in agreement.

          But the focus of the project is on the mobile experience. Complaining about the lack of optimization on the desktop experience, with an ad-blocker to boot, for a mobile specific project is an edge case, in my opinion.

          • JoshMnem 2227 days ago
            If it makes the Web terrible for desktop users who block 3rd party JS from loading, then it's not an edge case, regardless of the name.
  • dzink 2227 days ago
    Step 1. AirBnB, VRBO and others list inventory for free. Step 2. Google starts offering rentals straight from search and forgets you have a site. Remember Facebook News anyone?
    • vthallam 2227 days ago
      Exactly this! Google Flights is already a thing and the hotel search works great too. Once they have enough people directly searching from Google, they can either charge Airbnb or hotels to send traffic or build its own Airbnb backend and roll it as Google product.
    • tomascot 2227 days ago
      Google is doing this with everything. In the end they will answer almost every query directly, except when you are looking for a site. Even then, they could try to identify what do you want from that site (if you use chrome or the site has google analytics) and show you the info you are lloking for.
  • pg_bot 2227 days ago
    I'm still shocked that anyone treats AMP with anything other than contempt. Is it really that difficult to make your site faster? Blaming your crappy html/js/css on marketing demands doesn't pass the smell test for me. IMO too many engineers pass the buck instead of owning up to bad decisions and correcting them.
    • lazyjones 2227 days ago
      > I'm still shocked that anyone treats AMP with anything other than contempt.

      The more people treat it with contempt, the higher its value becomes for the others due to its only advantage, getting a SEO boost from Google.

      Also, marketing people (in some cases for good reason) already feel locked-in by and fully dependent on Google with >50% of their traffic coming from there.

  • dmitriid 2227 days ago
    Meanwhile in December AirBnB's HTML page weighed in at over 1MB. Of just HTML: https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/939097733260038144

    They shouldn't put AMP at the core of their strategy. It's enough to just make proper pages (the page referenced in the link is now much slimmer)

    • api 2227 days ago
      But marketing wants this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and ...
      • TurningCanadian 2227 days ago
        Give the marketing team a performance budget to work within?
    • halfteatree 2227 days ago
      I mean, embedding data into html looks bad, but is it really worse than loading a script separately? This is basically the "bundling" on the HTML layer, i.e., what HTTP/2 should offer.

      For a website like Airbnb, 1.9M for total asset size doesn't seem bad...

      • treve 2227 days ago
        I got 8MB for the entire site (homepage, from empty cache). I don't think it's that bad either. The webapp does also 'feel' bloated to me, but it might not be due to total transferred bytes, but rather just the JS heavy frontend.
  • sitkack 2227 days ago
    Airbnb doesn't know how to make a front-end that can talk to a back-end w/o breaking.

    Seriously, use it on a connection with packet loss and it will corrupt your application state so hard you will have to switch browsers to resolve it.

    • guitarbill 2227 days ago
      Not to mention their website just plainly sucks, and was clearly an afterthought. Maybe nobody there could believe people wouldn’t want to install yet another app?
      • rafi_kamal 2227 days ago
        Interesting, I use AirBnB quite a lot and like their UI (I primarily use the desktop version, though). Why do you think their website sucks?
        • _red 2227 days ago
          Its an all around bad design. Not really a UI problem, its more of a state / workflow problem.

          Its levels upon levels. You keep having to drill 2 or 3 levels down, but then lose the context of the higher levels when you do. For instance, when you finally click on a property, this now opens a new tab. But now this property tab doesn't show a map...so if you are looking at 4 properties, you now need to keep the "main map" page open so you can manually cross-reference what properties are where.

          Effectively its impossible to get anything done with having 3 or 4 tabs open all dedicated to Airbnb. Love the service and the places I wind up finding, but their website really needs a re-think.

    • asveikau 2227 days ago
      Some time ago I was surprised that https://airbnb.com was serving me a revoked certificate. Then still when I checked a few months later.

      I furrowed a brow and thought to myself, "this, from a company with lots of hype and accolades". But OK, certificate revocation is not very well implemented around the industry, so maybe just an honest mistake.

    • kilroy123 2227 days ago
      It's very buggy on a desktop for sure.
  • ggggtez 2227 days ago
    There's a lot of AMP hate on hacker news and I've never quite understood why. They talk about it destroying the open web, as if the existence of Facebook, Google, Amazon didn't already make a big dent in it. Really? AMP is the cross you're going to die on? I just don't get it.
    • idle_processor 2227 days ago
      There's enough animosity out there to spread around between AMP and other centralizing forces. Calling one out doesn't implicitly give the others a pass.

      Facebook (especially Instant Articles and video rehosting[0]) is awful for very similar reasons.

      What's pernicious about AMP & co. is seizure of control and immense abuse potential that comes with preventing visitors from hitting content creators' domains.

      ---

      [0] http://splitsider.com/2018/02/how-facebook-is-killing-comedy...

    • throwawaymaroon 2227 days ago
      It's the same people pounding their fists on the walls closing in around us
  • pablo-massa 2227 days ago
    I have mixed feelings about AMP.

    One thing that always I feel on discussions about AMP is that is something that is going to happen, and is not, is happening right now, regular users are already having better and great experiences on mobile.

    That is the good side that I see of the project, Google was capable of do that in about 2 years. Pushing development best practices seems that was not enough, companies stills doing awful job on the performance side of their websites.

    AMP was like force companies to do other version of their websites with limitations that prevent doing stupid development and design decisions like js/css/html bloat, repeat components and more.

    You like that beautiful readable and organized Medium post?, is a good experience right?, well, it happens that the editor has a lot of limitations like only let you choose 3 text hierarchies, 3 image sizes, one font family, no colors, etc. For me AMP is something like that but in the development side instead on the visual design side.

    The terrifying part is that Google has created a parallel version of the web who fill their needs, a stripped down version[1] that feels like an authoritarian power blocks the freedom that the "native" web always has, also happens that this parallel version has some advantages and people are loving it.

    I see AMP as a temporary patch of the web.

    [1] https://ampbyexample.com

  • stevew20 2227 days ago
    To those who think this could be a good idea: do some research on AMP, then reevaluate your opinion.

    To my mind, AMP is a content reassociation tool, not a content distribution speedup tool. It succeeds in both, was designed as the former, and marketed as the latter. If Airbnb goes through with this folly, how exactly will they retain their business?

    Google will be essentially filtering every booking that goes to Airbnb, controlling both the customer and the listings. I see most comments on HN are in agreement with this view, and those that aren't don't seem to meet the quality level normal to HN. Makes you wonder who exactly made this decision...

    • fastball 2227 days ago
      I made my personal website AMP compatible. Took me an hour in total (including research) and in the future if I don't want the google amp overhead I can remove a single line of code and my website will run fine.

      FUD.

      • dingo_bat 2227 days ago
        Or you could optimize your website and not depend on google at all forever.
        • fastball 2226 days ago
          The only thinking I'm depending on Google for is some post-loading. Otherwise AMP is just optimizations, most of them are just thinks I hadn't thought of before trying to make my site AMP compatible (things like only using hardware accelerated animations and such).
  • tyfon 2227 days ago
    So I have seen a lot of discussion about AMP but I have yet to see it in the wild using my phone.

    Is it something I have to turn on or is it restricted to certain countries?

    I browse from Norway.

    • itslennysfault 2227 days ago
      Consider yourself lucky. I'm guessing it's because of location. A quick search for "Google Amp" had this result near the top (an Amp version of a tech crunch article). If you open it on a computer it just redirects to techcrunch.com, but on a phone it should stay on the google domain and have a little top bar added (unless it redirects you past due to region?).

      https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/amp-f...

      • tyfon 2227 days ago
        I just opened it on my phone and I was redireced to techcrunch.com without any overlays or whatnot.

        Maybe they are afraid that EU will smack them down for anti-competitive behaviour.

        • clan 2227 days ago
          In Denmark I get the AMP results.

          The link posted above will show a prominent "techcrunch.com" at the top - but the URL is still Google. I am not redirected to their own site.

          • dingo_bat 2227 days ago
            You can click on the link icon beside the "techcrunch.com" text at the top and the actual link shows up. You can click it and go to the actual page.
  • dingo_bat 2227 days ago
    I don't see any performance measurements before or after. Are these presented in the video? If not, this is a monumental waste of time in my opinion.
  • pavel_lishin 2227 days ago
    "Boys, gather up the eggs, have I got a basket for us!"
    • libria 2227 days ago
      AMP is just a subset of HTML/javascript so they're not out on a limb if AMP disappers.
      • callahad 2227 days ago
        It really, really isn't. For one, your own JavaScript isn't allowed (though they just announced that they're working on that), for two, AMP is a not a subset of HTML, as it adds tons of Custom Elements in addition to the whitelist of standard HTML tags, and lastly, they're at least out on a small limb if it goes away, as you're not allowed to self-host the AMP framework and still be valid AMP.

        There are many redeeming qualities to AMP, including its significant technical merit, but the subset claim is neither accurate nor the strongest argument.

      • aphextron 2227 days ago
        >AMP is just a subset of HTML/javascript so they're not out on a limb if AMP disappers.

        That's not all there is to it, though. There's a whole Polymer-esque AMP JS framework that Google is pushing people to use [0]. While it does some great things, it's still absolutely an attempt at vendor lockin.

        [0] https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components

        • untog 2227 days ago
          In fairness, Polymer is a Web Components-esque JS framework, so it is, in the end, targeting an open standard. I'm still not a fan of it, but...
  • gaius 2227 days ago
    Two dodgy companies, made for each other. Maybe Uber could get involved somehow .
  • jstewartmobile 2227 days ago
    And that great race-to-the-bottom we call the web gently accelerates. Its trajectory, unchanged.