alt Hacker NewsThere was also AMP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages), where Google gave a huge reputation boost to your pages provided you served them under a different URL that Google could discover, and you massively stripped down the HTML and CSS to Google's limited subset.
It's effectively dead today, and while it was dominant, Google abused it to get people to view and link to their cached copies of AMP pages, rather than the original site.
It also led to widespread abuse where the AMP version of the page differed in content significantly from the regular page. The same issue existed for WAP.
You may also remember browsing the web using Opera Mini, which wasn't a direct user-agent but used Opera's backend systems as a proxy that stripped, minified and compressed HTML/CSS, and resized and recompressed images. It let you browse the web using massively less mobile data, but raised a lot of privacy and security issues.
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Google AMP might have enforced stripped down HTML, but I think you were also supposed to embed their JS as well, probably making a page that was lightweight from the start heavier…
> It's effectively dead today, and while it was dominant, Google abused it to get people to view and link to their cached copies of AMP pages, rather than the original site.
That was the entire point of the tech. If Google had wanted they could have upranked simple and lightweight websites but they didn’t do that (at least not until whoever had used amp for their promo package left and the project was killed).