Google search doesn't really have many options like this, and I'd be shocked if they added this one.
But given the URL format, it should be trivial for a browser extensions to rewrite links or requests from AMP pages to the original. I bet it already exists.
Samsung's browser does, and has reasonable marketshare. With a few tweaks iOS content blockers could achieve this, and I have to wonder if Apple are considering it.
You're right - Bing can't. Google knows a website's pageviews because it can cleverly cross information between the search engine, Google Analytics and Google Map's by-foot frequentation of shops (for shops and customers with tracking allowed). I'm just underlining that not owning a good share of all 3 of those may make it much harder for future competitors to enter the market.
Worth reading the HN posts linked in the article. IMO it's a band-aid for a larger problem - a problem that Google is now incentivised not to address through less hegemonic means.
Because now there's a big back button as well as a browser back button both back to Google, instead of just a browser back button and a menu to explore the rest of the site.
Google is no longer neutral, they own those users, not you.
I'm not commenting on "ethics", but I can say why I dislike AMP as a user: I want to interact directly with a website, not through some third party. I especially don't want that third party observing my interactions or collecting data about them. I also don't want to allow that third party to run code (javascript) on my computer.
As a website designer (barely), basically the same reasons: I don't want my site under control of a third party, I don't want my users to have to run javascript to view my site, and I don't want them to have to consent to (possibly) being tracked. Most ironically, my site probably accomplishes more of the stated AMP goals (due to being pure html and light) than it would when AMPed up.
Quick edit: I also worry it can contribute to breaking or obfuscating hyperlinks, which is similar to the issue raised in this article. Having hyperlinks work correctly is crucial to the design of the web. I had similar problems when sites like Google search started making their search links redirect to some intermediate site before going to the actual link, and back when I used Google search I had an extension that removed them so I could e.g. right-click and copy the link.
I just want to mention (1) I view this as a bad thing and think we ought to try to move away from it; (2) I whitelist javascript so at least not all of the above is happening to me, and I think we ought to move toward all users having the tools and competence to do the same.
From my perspective as a browser developer, AMP is an unfortunate disincentive to make anything faster unless Chrome already did it. Google bans things that are slow in Chrome from AMP, even if there's no good reason for them to be slow in the first place.
An example is off-main-thread animations. There's no intrinsic reason why animating, say, background-color should be slow. A lot of sites empirically do this sort of thing. But that animation is banned in AMP [1], because it's slow in Chrome (and in other browsers). Even if I work on making it faster, it'll stay banned until Chrome catches up (due to Chrome's market share), thus negating the incentive to make it faster in the first place. Without this competition, Web developers and users lose.
Apart from everything else, in the last few weeks I've seen a bunch of AMP pages that include at most the first few paragraphs, possibly just a photo or something, and a "read more on our website" link below. This is strictly worse than a world with no AMP: I have to load the AMP page, and then I have to load the real website.
Because of that I'm starting to seriously wonder if Google is going to end up declaring AMP a failed project (and, being Google, the prior probability was reasonably high in the first place), and then AMP is an uncleanable stain on the web, with www.google.com/amp/ URLs being kept around forever.
>Can anyone explain the reason why people think its ethically bad
This is just one of many reasons, but try this on a mobile phone.
Go to Google and search for "Trump"
Note what choices you have to pick from without excessive scrolling. They all end in either ads or Google urls.
Click one of the featured stories in the carousel, almost guaranteed to be an AMP site. Seems to be a prerequisite to sit in the carousel.
Lets say you land on a Washington Post story. What do you think a "right swipe" should do? Should it navigate to a competitor of Wapo? This is Wapo's page, right? So it should go to another Wapo page. Nope, it goes to Fox News.
Okay, so now you've navigated from Wapo to say Fox News. Hit the back button. It should go back to the Wapo story, right? Nope, goes back to Google.
How this isn't viewed as a land grab is a mystery to me.
what is this right-swipe business? You swipe and it, what, just takes you to a page that the makers of the current page think you should read next in your infinite time-sink staring at your phone‽
Many reasons. A popular one would be to flip through a gallery of photos related to the story. That one's VERY common.
Also, I missed mentioning the [X] button on the AMP header banner. I bet that most end users think that [X] button should make the AMP banner disappear, while leaving the page content there. Pretty common pattern, like for the EU cookie warning. That's not what it does, though.
Back to the "right swipe", at the very least, it should do nothing, assuming that an AMP page belongs to the publisher.
Ok, sure. Going through a slide-show makes total sense. So, you're saying that there's no normal behavior on a plain website for swiping right (yes? I don't use mobile much myself), but AMP adds a Google-centric swipe-right function regardless of whether there would otherwise be no swipe-right function or some other expected one. Am I understanding now?
Yes, that's it. Google hijacks the back button, swipes, and the [X] button on the AMP banner...in favor of Google, and to the detriment of the publisher.
That is indeed horrible. I am glad to learn that there isn't otherwise some new trend of people constantly right-swiping for no apparent reason though.
The argument that swipe behavior should be entirely within the control of the publisher feels like an oversimplification. Plenty of UI elements are designed to work at a higher level of scope than the document: back, bookmark list, [X] button, home button, etc.
Yes, I did mention how Google hijacks the back button on AMP pages as well. The point being that AMP is a walled garden to serve Google's needs...not an honest effort to make sites perform better.
You mention the [X] button. How many end users do you suppose think that the [X] on the AMP header bar should make the header bar go away...versus functioning like a back button, going all the way back to the google search? I suspect they are conditioned by things like the EU cookie warnings that an [X] on a header bar makes it go away.
An AMP page you reach from a Google search is Google's page, period. It's not the publisher's page. And that's no accident or side effect. It's the whole point. Performance is a secondary concern.
For some reason I'm not experiencing the same at all.
I googled "Trump". First five stories in carousel (wapo, bbc et all) are not AMP. I see only one AMP link in the first page results. Click on it, page loads. Swipe right/back button gets me to Google results (as expected). Is it because I'm on an iPhone and this is an Android thing?
Not an iPhone issue - https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=trump returns. I thing but amp pages I’ve the carousel or the first page of results other than the links to Wikipedia and his Twitter page.
Same search though ddg with !g comes out completely different though....
Thank you! I’ve been wondering what this AMP fiasco was all about when I have never seen such a site. It turns out I have developed banner-blindness on the Google search results. I have always scrolled to the “real” first result without ever considering the ads and carousels.
Also, before there was no guarantee that the organic results would contain Google ads as publishers could relatively easily find higher CPM payouts elsewhere.
Well, with AMP, the the mobile results are basically ads, then AMP results which are guaranteed to have Google ads. So the percentage of searches makes Google money increases while similar reducing revenue from competitive ad networks who are not approved.
Leaving aside the lock-in issues, AMP causes me minor annoyances more often than it helps. For instance, when I open a search result from a site like Reddit, I get a static logged-out view, instead of the normal one that obeys my preferences. And if I want to copy the link, it takes a few extra taps to get the original one.
I still don't understand why Reddit signed up, it's a terrible experience for their users. I commonly search 'reddit x' when I want an opinion and know there will be a sub Reddit, but now Reddit have made that use case incredibly bad by enabling AMP.
I'd imagine a notoriously cash-strapped site like Reddit is enthusiastic that Google is willing to offload traffic originating from Google Search on Mobile to Google's own AMP CDN. This helps incidental visitors still consume Reddit content, while real Reddit users interacting with real website or through a Reddit app are still getting the normal experience. This arrangement only really frays at edge cases, where a logged-in Reddit user uses an external search like Google to look something up.
All else being equal, disabling ads and other javascript bs will speed up most websites, so if Google really cared about speed, they would (also) boost sites which didn't show ads and didn't rely heavily on JS. AMP is about keeping users on google's properties by using content that they didn't create.
It isn't. I fully agree with the article that it should be optional, but it's hilarious how the only reason the author can give is that it "doesn't feel right".
They state "I just automatically go to the main url" without giving any real reason for it. They also mention how all studies show that it's a huge positive for users. And it is. It's much faster and easier way to browse content. You can try to shit on Google, but the reality is that people sucked at making fast content, so someone had to step in and no one was.
I'm trying to imagine the uproar if Apple had done AMP instead of Google. Somehow AMP has some staunch defenders, but everything, and I mean everything about how it's been approached has felt very anti-web and pro-Google. The overall concept may be sound, but the implementation, and the inability to escape it, has significantly hurt my opinion of Google. In fact, I no longer use Google's search because of it.
Do you think there would be an uproar? Apple introduced reading mode, built-in content/ad blocking, etc. AMP actually fits in the profile of Apple -- prioritizing a fast, usable solution.
This author notes that they "feel bad" about consuming AMP content. Which is extremely weird given that content creators intentionally volunteer their content to AMP (aside from this user who got famous claiming that Google was stealing their content because they had enabled a Wordpress plug-in haphazardly).
If Google blacklisted non-AMP content, or even just deranked it, sure there's an argument, but as of yet this notion that it's some content theft is quite strange.
Google's intention with AMP is obvious, and obviously not anti-web: Facebook is becoming a primary medium where users are accessing a lot of content. I personally read all news via Facebook now, where they've integrated it heavily with a built-in browser and now instant articles (Facebook's AMP). Compared to this, the traditional web is just an obnoxious mess, not because of the web but because of the abuse that AMP restricts.
There was a vicious spiral at work related to advertisers not caring enough about page load, and adding that signal was not enough. AMP shifted the game by placing the burden on Google of specifying a way to hit advertisers' goals while offering a faster experience.
It seems to be switching to the next article on the carousel. Which, at least for me completely breaks the web experience. Opening an amp page from google requires getting used to a whole new set of, in my opinion, unnecessary conventions.
I can't think of another search engine alternative - a truly objective one. It used to be Google. Then they gained a tremendous amount of market share. Even an English language verb - googled. Now it's them. And I ask, now what?
Try out DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/). I've been using it for a few years and love it. They don't track you. They don't store your info. Plus, as far as I know they don't do anything besides search so they have no reason to not be objective.
I use DDG on all my devices at home and work. This whole thread has been a learning experience to me, because I never experience the various problems people have been reporting with AMP.
Perhaps my results could have been loading faster? I'm not willing to make a deal with the devil to find out. I'm pretty satisfied with what I have now.
I don't think its comparable to Apple. Apple is trying to make the user experience of existing content better (where it is located)
Google is taking the content and serving it themselves.
The problem is sites being slow in the first place, but Apple isn't commandeering the content itself like Google is by creating a mode where the browser can enhance legibility of any article.
Huh? That doesn't hold true for whole iTunes, News stand, Music, iBooks, Podcasts and all other content silos Apple introduced. If anything they even deliberately make content consumption from competing sources harder on iOS devices.
but Apple isn't commandeering the content itself like Google is
Content authors voluntarily publish their content in AMP form, so it doesn't seem fair to say that they commandeer anything: AMP is a subset of HTML intended for a fast mobile experience, and if you decide to take part you publish flags allowing Google to cache it. Google isn't unilaterally converting content to AMP.
The core argument against AMP primarily seems to be a fear that users will actually prefer AMP content. Which is ultimately rather anti-user.
Exactly and thanks for pointing out. What matters most is the user and user experience, It is NOT about Google or Apple. Posts like they are the #2 corp or whatever is not relevant.
Restricting what you use to the AMP subset would make your page quite fast, with a dependency on a javascript file that most mobile browsers should have cached, along with having your page in the top carousel loading in smoothly like all the others. This can all be detected from your main page when crawled (as it'll link to the AMP version) so depending on the device one or the other can be presented as a search result.
Custom Elements are a web standard. Anyone can just make up new tags, if they include a hyphen in the name. And with customElements.define() you can attach an ES6 class to that element and boom, DOM as an open component model.
AMP is a subset because in addition to the elements, they provide a set of restrictions that would make your page "valid AMP" and cached by Google's creepy CDN thingy.
Caching is a part of the platform and is entirely coherent with the goals, and if you want analytics or ads, you approach those in a different way. AMP caching isn't limited to Google - Bing, for instance, caches and serves AMP as well. Ultimately anyone could, and HN could cache and quick-serve AMP content for supporting sources. AMP is open source and any one can take part.
I should add a side note that many of the comments on here have taken the predictable turn of claiming that people who defend AMP are "over invested" or must work at Google. I have nothing to do with Google, and have a reasoned, fact-based opinion on AMP. I think it's a last-ditch salvation for a web where sites are demonstrating a tragedy of the commons. Nor do I think everyone denouncing AMP works for Apple or some competitor.
Coherent with the goals, sure, but not required for any benefit. [edit for clarity, while it may improve things, it is not required for at least some benefit]
What I dislike is not being able to choose simply to make and host an AMP content myself without google taking it and hosting it on their own servers. I cannot opt-in to this, nor can I opt-out. My only choice is to not do anything with AMP.
What is the way to host your own AMP cache? The AMP project under caching just shows the google cache and links to a google page.
As a side note, what if what I publish is not acceptable by google? Will they remove my content, despite having already taken it and given it to people under that URL? If AMP content must be loaded from the caches, is my content only valid AMP if google and the jurisdictions they operate under approve?
"Open source" in that context is a meaninless buzzword. It is not "open" when giant companies appify your content in their walled gardens, even if you can read part of the code.
I mean that I subscribe to the feeds of the media that I find useful, not that I follow their hot topics or suggested feeds.
And many of those media sites use Instant Articles (Facebook's AMP) and honestly I've found that I greatly prefer them, because it really sucks to click a story and have an abomination that grinds my device to a halt, starts a hidden autoplay video, etc. The same forces are at play: Controlling sites that destroy the web by making it such a miserable experience.
> you're being spoon fed the news fb's algos want you to see.
This comment is applicable to all media sources: replace "fb's algos" with any newspaper, website, or TV channel name. You might want to be careful of sourcing your news from one single source instead.
> given that content creators intentionally volunteer their content to AMP
This is certainly not true. The reason no many content creators and publishers moved to AMP is to not hurt their SEO.
If you check most of the AMP articles targeted to publishers, it's addressed as get on the AMP wagon now or else you are doomed when Google starts ranking AMP pages higher.
Oh but it's entirely true. If you buy the conspiracies and allusions of the anti-AMP crowd, there should be some sort of citation you can leverage. As is, the primary real concern among those who denounce AMP is that users will prefer it. Which is a pretty bizarre thing to fight against.
Which search result, and which obscure AMP result ranks higher than which non-AMP result? That's what needs to be cited, not an assertion free of evidence.
Second, even if that does happen, the question is whether it would have happened without AMP. In other words, is it a bug in the search algorithm, independent of AMP.
I agree with the other comments that you seem overly invested in this, but I'll play along: Do a search for "wwdc" on mobile. This was my first and only test against your challenge.
It isn't just a matter of the AMP results being ranked higher — they are segmented from non-AMP pages. The eleven (!) "Top Stories" are all AMP pages.
Under that is "People also searched for > WWDC iPhone 8", which consists of five (!) AMP pages.
Only then does it go into non-AMP pages, starting with Apple's own WWDC page. That's not just rank prioritization. There is a visual break between AMP and non-AMP pages.
It is crazier for you to blindly trust Google on this than it is for us to infer from a pattern we see over and over again, and for you to require that we provide proof that you acknowledge we can't obtain might be crazier.
I don't see us having a constructive exchange of views, where each person gets a perspective they didn't have earlier, so I won't reply. Have a good day.
> where each person gets a perspective they didn't have earlier
That's not really how arguments work. I mean, sure, sometimes it works that way, but other times, like this time, one person is clearly in the wrong, and is simply refusing to listen to the other side.
You're confusing an important thing here: Google places news higher than the original source. Given that WWDC is over, this is actually preferable. It is true that all the news results are AMPed, but there was certainly a time when not everyone was onboard yet and the carousel included non-AMP results (I assume if you can find a news topic sufficiently obscure to have a non-AMP publisher, yet important enough for Top Stories it might show up).
If you instead search for "Iceland hikes" you get a useful one box of info, then an AMPed page then a non-AMPed result and so on.
tl;dr: Popular news publications are certainly all AMPified these days, and Top News is clearly prioritized. Regular search results aren't as clearly AMP leaning.
So you are confirming what is the mainstream thought in this thread: Google is actually ranking higher AMP pages compared to normal content.
Because I think that each top ranking news website has also a non AMP-ed version.
But, as per you admission and the anecdota in this thread, all the news are litterally dominated by AMP results.
So I can't really see how people can still assert that AMP has no whatsoever influence in ranking when all the news results have a huge skew toward the AMP-ed version of any website instead of the original one.
I reckon the deeper purpose behind AMP is to fight ad blockers. Another google source in a thread from a few months back mentioned that the AMP team was within Google's advertising division.
The goal is to get all the content onto google servers so they can serve ads from the same origin that cannot be blocked.
Amp in combination with chrome's built in "ad blocker" is part of a broader Google strategy to protect their advertising model.
> It is true that all the news results are AMPed, but there was certainly a time when not everyone was onboard yet
Not everyone is on board. Many sites don't want AMPified pages. Google takes AMP pages and puts a giant "back" button that takes the website's users back to Google Search rather than deeper into the website.
It breaks URLs and referrers, because the AMP pages are now hosted on google.com, not on the destination websites' own domains.
AMP is a terrible attack on the open WWW. Google is saying, let us appify your content on our own platform (not on your own independent website) and restrict your markup/monitization options or we will drop you out of the top spot of the rankings.
This post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14536679) is an example of how AMP works. Someone has shared a link on HN. It's an AMP link, but I'm reading it on my laptop, and it's still AMP.
The end result is that all users (desktop too) are getting sent to an appified version of the page that restricts advertising/monetization options and markup options. It seems unlikely that the people who designed AMP were unaware of how this would work in practice.
I think that the core motivation for AMP has little to do with speeding up the Web, but is more about ensuring that Google's ads are delivered and so they have some say in which ad competitors are locked out.
It would be interesting to find out how much total traffic ends up on AMP pages, broken down by device type.
What is the point of AMP? Google could have made the web faster by just de-ranking slow sites, what advantage does AMP actually provide beyond this?
The most glaringly obvious change is that you never leave google now. There's a nice little wrapper around the site with a back button that leads you straight back to google without even a page reload.
Oh but AMP isn't evil because it's open source. Open source but if you change a single byte in any file it doesn't verify anymore and arguably is no longer AMP.
Google wasn't even planning to show the original URL at all until people made a shitload of noise about it. And it took a month to add because reasons??? It surely looks like quite a difficult feature to implement, showing a URL and all. It must have been quite challenging.
I also enjoy the feature that there's no way to shut AMP off. Why would anyone want to? Maybe this is also to difficult a task for the AMP team to implement.
I know you don't work on search, but I still wanted to let you know I'm happy whenever an AMP site loads, because its instant, and that it loads at all, as opposed to other sites that may time out on my slow unreliable cellular connection in India. The UX is also more consistent, which lets me quickly read the article without wading through all the junk to find it.
I think that most people who are opposed to AMP aren't against it for personal reasons as much as for what it does to the open WWW. If you give up your long-term freedoms for perceived short-term personal convenience, you will end up in a worse place. If you want news with a consistent interface, there are apps for that -- the open Web shouldn't be destroyed for the rest of us in the process.
I understand and respect that you're not against AMP for personal reasons.
An acquaintance of mine was complaining that Google didn't give him a way to opt his site out of AMP. If he's right, that's a bad move on Google's part. Google should let web site owners choose to not have their content served from google.com.
When I come across an AMP search result on my phone, I'm happy, because I know it will load, and load instantly. Web pages often don't load on cellular internet in India, and a web that works is more important to me than one that's "open". Not to mention that openness is ultimately about accessibility, and if hundreds of millions of people can't access it reliably, it's not open. You may not be able to relate to this since you're based in a developed country, where the Internet works reliably.
Maybe Google is acting in users' best interests, but not site owners'.
My view about AMP is more nuanced than a binary yes/no. Reducing it to a binary choice throws the baby out with the bathwater. Maybe you have a different view, in which case I again respect it, but we should agree to disagree.
Searching "wwdc" on google.fr
The very first result (top story) is not an AMP page.
The other top stories are AMP pages.
Then, in the regular search results, only the last one is an AMP page.
Searching "wwdc iphone 8" (not in the "people also searched" list for me) yields about 50% AMP pages. The first result is but the second isn't.
I don't really see a pattern here. The only part where AMP seems mandatory is the news carousel.
Try searching for pretty much any trending term on Google, on mobile. How many results in that top carousel aren't AMP pages? I'm yet to see a single one.
Is it really that surprising that Google finds crawling pages stored on their own CDN to be faster than pages stored... anywhere else? They don't even need to leave the Google network.
I do not really believe that. I have a site which is served way faster than it's Amp version. Obviously Google never really care to check whether original page is faster than AMP. Yes I have numbers. AMP version loads about 400ms. While the original was about 300ms. Almost certain for all pages.
That was likely a singular measurement, likely from your notebook. A user at some other location might very much disagree, unless your site has a CDN as extensive as Google.
"Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski already recreated the Google AMP demo page without the Google AMP JavaScript and, unsurprisingly, it's faster than Google's version."
Agreed, I like AMP for
many of the same reasons I liked Google Reader and RSS feeds: I'd rather consume my content in a form that's optimized for reading.
For someone with poor vision, I frequently have to zoom my browser (in landscape mode) on my iPhone in order to be able to read the text/font. When on an AMP page, the scroll mechanism gets locked when I zoom in and I have to i zoom out completely before I can scroll the page. Of course this doesn't happen on non-AMP pages.
I'd have a lot less problems with it if it didn't break my zoom functionality.
I feel somewhat insulted by this. I am anti-AMP from a consumer perspective - I don't want to consume all my content via a Google CDN and I fear that this may be the end game that Google are playing for.
> If Google blacklisted non-AMP content, or even just deranked it, sure there's an argument, but as of yet this notion that it's some content theft is quite strange.
They do kind of do this. AMP pages get highlighted and populate the top results( at least for me) which kind of has the same effect as reducing the rank of normal websites.
There are two things here that I feel are being conflated.
There's the AMP library and format. That is a huge part of what you're talking about with speed, annoying popups, etc. It's an open source library and people can use it or not.
Then there's Google grabbing all of the AMP pages, rewriting them and putting them on a Google domain.
You cannot opt out of the second part. There's not a lot of abuse I can think of that's being restricted by this, and it feels like it would be a simple problem to fix.
AFAIK AMP is just a list of Do's and Dont's that google qualify as AMP content. Even other search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing could use it if the choose so. You can access AMP outside of google and host it yourself. You can go AMP-only if you o please. Instant Articles from Facebook on other hand is tied into facebook's platform.
same it's amazing how different responses would be depending on the company who did an action. just goes to show the power of good pr. pretend to do some moonshots which you shut down a few years later and you can get away with anything
I'm not using it too, but not because of that (and I was unaware of amp before). DDG shows instant wiki, stackoverflow, lyrics previews, while google only does that for wiki. I don't use gmail because of crappy ui, ux and designs. I wouldn't use annoying youtube if dailymotion was not blocked. Translate is only bearable for english. Local maps are way better in navigation/street/company info (probably not true for US/EU).
Summarizing, I clearly see no value in google services for me today and it was surprisingly easy to get rid of it completely.
Edit: and in search regard, ddg/yahoo links lag far less than google's redirects and ddg never presented me "you're a robot, enter captcha to not get to our search service anyway" for hours.
I'm not native speaker and can't get what "appropriating" means here. But that wasn't a criticism, that was a sharing of observation that, despite of "the fact" that google search is superior and irreplaceable, this is simply not true at least for one guy like me. Discovering that is very hard, unless some default browser in popular linux distro temporarily forces you to non-default default.
Other services were mentioned only to support "completely" part, which is criticism, but not search-related.
Same here. On the other hand it has not, as far as I know affected my life - nobody in my country seems to be working on AMP projects, nobody I consult for has ever asked for it, I don't think I ever end up on an AMP page. Really for me it seems like a technology that is failing fast, but what I hear from the U.S seems to threaten the opposite.
You can compare Google's AMP to Apple's efforts with Apple News. It also is locked down and anti-web, but it's also entirely opt-in both for publishers and users.
So another article was posted a couple weeks ago about AMP. One advantage I have seen is that you can get around intranet blocking sites if they support AMP. Besides obviously speed this is the only advantage I have found.
I suggest stop using google search altogether. https://duckduckgo.com/ is an excellent search engine and its trivial to make a google search via `!g` prefix when you are not finding what you are looking for.
I moved off of gmail a few months ago, pretty happy about that but man duckduckgo fucking suuuucks. Really wish there was a nonprofit (with a strong privacy policy) wikipedia like .org solution that provided good results.
What problems are you running in to? I've been using duckduckgo at work for just over a year now (took a change of job as an ideal time to try a complete switch in search engine too), and it has been excellent. I've been getting almost as good results as I do from google on even from some fairly vague terms, and comparable to Google when I give it explicit text to search for. Unlike Google it also seems to pay a lot more attention to searching for what I'm asking for, instead of trying to play guessing games.
This is because Google also tries to build a profile for you and serves different results based on that, while DDG will return the same thing for the same keywords to different people.
For searches in specific domains it is better to use bangs. For example prefixing with !py shows results from python manual.
I've found this to be true for Bing too. For general search, it matches Google in accuracy. But in the case when I want to find a specific compilation error, only Google gives me useful results. But I still use Bing, and switch to Google only for such stuff.
I always search for things on duckduckgo and basically always find good enough results. I can only guess that everyone who thinks the results are bad has been using Google so much that they get really user-specific results that they like, despite the bubble.
Not OP but I recently switched to Fastmail myself. It's web interface is a bit bland but you can use IMAP/SMTP and your device's built in client if that's an issue
Liking it so far, really liking being able to attach my domains natively to my inbox
Not OP, but I switched to my domain provider's email service. I use IMAP on my phone and POP3 on my computer, so when I'm away I can sneak-peek via the phone, but when I'm at my computer I pop the messages and classify locally, which removes them from the server. The cheapest mail service out there is about $5/mo, but this way all I pay is the annual renewal about $10.
Oh yeah it sucks. The main problem for me is the broken autocomplete. E.g. you want to search "Sydney Thai Restaurants"; you start typing "Sydney Thai res" and you click the first suggestion because duckduckgo is auto-completing the word "restaurants"... except now your search is "London Thai Restaurant".
the thing is, if you expect DevOps- and testing-related results to a cucumber chef query[0], the search provider really needs to keep a file on you. otherwise you're going to get pages and pages of salad, end of story. this was the nature of the loss of relevancy i saw in DDG results when i started using it several years ago. instead of complaining about it, i took it as a wakeup call to the severity of my google bubble problem.
I started using DDG a few months back and I've been very happy so far. Sometimes results aren't as great, so I just use !g to load Google. But even better, you can search across different websites! For example, !mdn for Mozilla Developer Network, or !yt for YouTube
Another thing you can do is use alternative browsers. On mobile I use Firefox Mobile, which has the benefit of allowing extensions, so you can install uBlock Origin! That makes a gigantic different in mobile web performance. On my laptop I've been using Safari as my main browser because it consumes far less memory, and it seems to handle mountains of tabs a lot better than Chrome.
I actually find DDG results to be better and more relevant a lot of the time nowadays. The only thing Google really has an edge on (for my use) is searching for academic articles, because of Google Scholar.
Sometimes though, I do have problems finding what I'm looking for (when it is obscure) so I pre-pend !g in front, but generally it's not much better ...
Same experience. I switched 4 years ago, and the search results that I'm interested in were as good or better than google.
Except scientific articles. I've yet to find a service that comes anywhere close to Google Scholar, which I think is the most successful of their products for my use case.
Can't agree. Almost always when DDG has only spam or useless results, !g gives me exactly what I looked for. I like DDG, especially the bangs, but Google still gives me way better results when I need them.
Just had an extremely horrendous example. Searching for "webpack 3" the first link doesn't mention "webpack" at all, only packweb and generally it's an absolutely useless result page.
The sad thing is that AOL & Yahoo is really Bing, and Ask is I believe Google. So essentially it comes down to Google and Bing.
To get DDG you'll need to use a different browser like FF.
I actually blocked Chrome on my phone and started using FF once I noticed that Chrome was updating itself even though I was requiring manual updates. Play Store and Google Play Services do the same thing, but don't have a good alternative for them,
AOL has Bing in the footer, Yahoo had Bing references in the source view when I checked, although it looks like what tallanvor said and they just return mix of search engines.
Yahoo was using Bing from around 2010 to 2015. But since then they've been using a variety of sources - Bing, Google, and presumably their own, and I think it can mix the results.
Yahoo's search business was always odd... They had their own search, then switched to search powered by Google. Then they purchased Overture, which owned AlltheWeb and AltaVista. Overture had originally purchased AlltheWeb from FAST, who had pivoted into the enterprise space, and later got bought by Microsoft and integrated into SharePoint.
DDG is probably worse than Google, but often it's good enough.
The !commands allow you to search more specific sites directly - if I know I want Wikipedia, which I often do, I can just type !w and search it directly. Similar for other things like IMBD, Wolfram Alpha, etc. It's just a convenience.
You can also search Google using a command, which is sometimes necessary when you're really crawling the depths of the internet for something old or weird, but nine times out of ten the straight DDG results will get you where you need in my experience.
Does Bing have "bangs" such as !gm for Google Maps, !gh for GitHub, !wa for WolframAlpha and so on? With no user tracking?
I was a heavy user of address bar search prefixes, but it's amazingly convenient to not have to think about it until the very end of a query (or even add it in the middle).
Then you'd get bubbled and tracked just like if you use Google, although you'd avoid AMP. DDG uses Bing and other sources, it's not literally just a wrapping of Bing.
Having been camping in a field for the past week but still needing my internet fix I think I'm going to start giving ddg a real chance (still hate the name though) until Google gives me a setting to disable AMP results
I get the idea behind AMP but it's just far too late to the game for Google to be pushing it so heavily. Back on 2G internet I used Opera Mini, I don't use that now because I just don't need it anymore
Well lucky you for having an impossibly great internet connection. Do you seriously never go anywhere with slightly less-than-perfect coverage? Or travel by train?
AMP is so much faster than 90% of websites 90% of the time I can see why Google push it so much.
Not my experience at all. And even with good signal many heavy news sites take a long time to load.
For example this mobile speed test puts theverge.com at 21 seconds to load! That matches my experience. You can't tell me AMP is as slow as that. It's not even close.
What made me move back to Google from DDG is the (by construction?) inability of the latter to learn what you're interested in. For things like documentation search, Google quickly starts tailoring results to $LANG.
I'm not sure I would go that far but I've given up on Google personally, though. Yahoo search is ok. Firefox's mobile UI isn't as good but I'm sticking with it. Email and Photos is pretty hard to get away from. Hopefully I'll be fully out some day in the near future.
I have hard time sympathizing with people who made the web a horrible blinking ad and malware laden experience for everyone. Especially when they're complaining about something that brings actually content and performance forward again.
That's the trojan horse though. Google pushes the performance aspects of AMP, when I suspect that's not the killer feature for them. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14529605
Google has a part in that too though. I have a hard time sympathizing with people who made the web into a panopticon, and as such I'm not inclined to hand them more power.
AMP exists because it benefits Google to know what content users read and what they click-through to. It has nothing to do with making a better internet.
How else can I ask you to enable push notifications the first time I see you, then ask if you want to sign up for my newsletter when your mouse moves up off the page?
I feel that way about the web ecosystem in general. I want Google Kingmaker Curation about as much as I want web "apps" with MB of JavaScript because some cargo culting webdev loves him some frameworks.
Like the article, I often dismiss AMP and visit the original, because I want the latest content - AMP is cached and so for sites like reddit the content is out of date.
The author's argument against AMP comes down to "I don’t know why I do it, but for some reason it just doesn’t feel “right” to me to consume the content through the AMP. It feels slightly off". This is... not a strong argument.
The AMP saga has pretty clearly shown that users care about content while Web developers only care about URLs and what goes over the wire. This is a huge disconnect. It doesn't help that many Web developers show no empathy for the users' viewpoint.
Ultimately it probably is easier for Google to add an opt-out to appease a very small, very vocal minority than to educate them that the URL doesn't matter.
You're being downvoted but you're absolutely right, this article is just weak and it's only popular because it voices a popular opinion, but does a very bad job at justifying it.
I fully agree that it should be optional and people who dislike it should be allowed to disable it. But as you mention, the author provide absolutely no real argument other than "it feels wrong".
All user studies so far show that it's a net positive, and I'd rather stick to real data than feelings or anectodes.
I personally love it, but I also agree that those who don't should be allowed to disable it.
Thank you for valid criticism. I've added the following to the post. Hope it clears up my point of view a bit better.
Some people expressed a valid criticism that just saying “doesn’t feel right” is not good enough. While I agree, I don’t have any solid data to back up my argument. I believe AMP (to some extent) is a hack on top of existing browsers and the Web, to create a faster in-browser “browser”. As a result a number of small things (scrolling etc) don’t work on my iPhone as I would normally expect. Considering that this post received over 1000 up-votes on Hacker News, making it one of the top 300 posts of all time, leads me to believe that I am not alone.
Isn't AMP just an RSS reader for the entire internet?
If they solved the URL issue somehow(even if faking the address bar), and had original and AMP links in search; it would probably reduce the antiAMP argument quite a bit. Which both seem to be just UI issues.
I CANT STAND sites that do that. At a minimum it's frustrating because I tend to hit it accidentally. Then there's the infuriating fact that it messes with the system back/forward gestures on iOS. Of course every website does something different so it's not really something you can actually learn to use.
Worst of all I was on the website the other day where I couldn't use pinch to zoom without it moving me to a different page. It was literally impossible to zoom into the content.
I can't stand all these things where websites seem to try to invente the features that are already built into mobile phones. "Will make a bar that makes it easy to share this!" I can ALREADY share things easily on my phone. And it doesn't waste 10% of my screen at all times. Also, I can configure at the way I want.
> Isn't AMP just an RSS reader for the entire internet?
No, AMP is basically WAP 3.0. A crippled, baby version of the internet invented because most Android devices are too slow to offer a decent browsing experience otherwise. Which is fine for the people who need it, but Google has to stop forcing it down everyone else's throat.
That's because Google sniffs Firefox's user agent and serves it an older, less featureful version of Google Search. One that doesn't support AMP. Spoofing Firefox's ua-string to appear as Chrome will get you the full Search experience, including AMP.
Google Search on Mobile is no longer a web search engine that hyperlinks to the resulting page, but rather an search-integrated newsreader that loads itself when you click on a result that's marked with AMP. This is understandably a big change from how things used to be, but it isn't going to get better anytime soon.
After all, most people on mobile spend their time inside apps, probably from some Google competitor like Facebook. Within these apps, they click on links, which increasingly load inside webviews; the framing app collects info on where people go, and uses this to sell targeted advertising. Facebook is a king in this space, and is now the second largest server of internet display ads, after Google.
Google's assault on Facebook's encroachment is twofold: drive people to Google's apps like the Google Now Launcher (now the default launcher on Android) or the Google app present in older versions of Android and available for iOS, and deploy the same content-framing techniques from their own search engine webpage on mobile user-agents, where the competition is most fierce, and they can also position it as legitimate UX improvement -- which, to their credit, is largely true, as bigpub content sites on mobile were usually usability nightmares and cesspits of ads.
I understand that the author and quite a few others are peeved at this behavior and that there's no way of turning it off. But it's really not in Google's best interest to even offer the option, because then many people will just turn it off, encouraged by articles like the author's own last year where he was caught off-guard and before he gained a more nuanced appreciation for what's really going on.
The bottom line is this: Google is inseparable from its ad-serving and adtech business -- it is after all how they make most of their money -- so if you are bothered by their attempts to safeguard their income stream from competitors who have a much easier time curating their own walled garden, you should cease using Google Search on Mobile. There are other alternatives, who may not be as thorough at search, but that's the cost of the tradeoff.
I feel the same way. 99% of what I do requires the non-mobile site. Most links I open are github pull requests and the mobile site doesn't give the option to approve with a message, second most common is Circle CI which again is worthless in mobile form, third most common is JIRA, which again, I have to click "request desktop" in the menu to be able to search and do everything I expect.
So in all the biggest apps like Gmail, Slack, etc. I now have to click a link and it shows up in process, then I have to pick the menu option to view it in real Chrome, then I have to pick the menu option to request desktop site. So they've added two clicks and two page loads to almost every site I visit.
"on mobile" these days can be anything from a 3'' device with 512MB RAM to the device you mention.
It's very easy to assume that everyone has the latest device in an affluent society that doesn't have much of a problem buying the latest and greatest, but I can assure you this isn't the case in most of the world.
You're failing to see that Google is used everywhere in the world and not all countries (in fact, very few) have markets where the standard device is what you describe or where everyone has blazing fast LTE available everywhere.
For example, there are places here in Colombia where 2G is the norm, that's the kind of people AMP is helping, not the bay area kid that has the latest iPhone and 100Mb Wi-Fi
Such luxuries. I spent several years reading web pages on a 33MHz 386DX with 8MB of RAM. Yes, Netscape took a while to start (had to wait for the rest of Win 3.1 to swap out), and downloading images was always somewhere between "slow" and "don't bother" even with the glorious 14.4kbps of a fancy V.32bis modem[1]. However, it still only took a few (15-20) seconds to fetch an article and render it.
The slowness started when websites decided it was fashionable to add a few dozen unnecessary HTTP requests to fetch megabytes of Javascript. The bloat is self inflicted, and websites do not need Google's help to make their pages small and fast. Unfortunately, many pages value the bloated ad loaders and trackers, several types of spyware ("analytics"), and their favorite "framework" more than they value the actual content of the page or the reader's experience. Google is happy to pretend the problem isn't self-inflicted when it gives them more tracking data.
Yes, it's important to remember that there will always be a wide variation in the User Agent. That's one of the reasons well-designed websites progressively enhance the heavier features. Websites can do this on their own - just like they did 10/15/20 years ago. An over-engineered caching system isn't necessary. Do you want a future where the internet retains some of it's interactive, decentralized qualities? Or do you want a fancier version of Cable TV, mostly controlled by Google et al?
[1] On weekends I was stuck with the old 2400bps V.22bis hand-me-down.
"You're failing to see that Google is used everywhere in the world and not all countries (in fact, very few) have markets where the standard device is what you describe or where everyone has blazing fast LTE available everywhere."
So here's an idea: Seeing as some folks _do_ have these powerful devices and fast connections, Google could make AMP _optional_.
> You're failing to see that Google is used everywhere in the world and not all countries (in fact, very few) have markets where the standard device is what you describe or where everyone has blazing fast LTE available everywhere.
So Googles solution is to pull everyone down to the lowest common denominator, which is shit. Google basically re-invented WAP and is trying to set the web back 15 years.
Sure, not everyone has a fast connection and a high-end device, but they could have easily limited AMP to just those devices instead of forcing it down everyones throat.
There are relatively cheap, unlocked Chinese phones available -- e.g., ZTE's Axon 7 -- with the aforementioned specs. One doesn't have to spend 600 USD+.
> "on mobile" these days is a device with a quad core, 3GB of RAM, and a 1080p + screen.
You left out the most important reasoning for AMP, which is the network. Even in the US, cellular networks are almost invariably slower/higher latency/less reliable than wired (or even wifi) networks. In other areas of the world where most users are not on 4g it's a huge difference.
> if you are bothered by their attempts to safeguard their income stream from competitors who have a much easier time curating their own walled garden, you should cease using Google Search on Mobile.
You're making excuses for Google, but forgetting about smaller, independent companies. It is not in our interests to have our content appified and restricted inside of Google's walled garden. When a big company like Google (or its competitors) attacks the open WWW, then web publishers should oppose it.
"The bottom line is this: Google is inseparable from its ad-serving and adtech business -- it is after all how they make most of their money -- so if you are bothered by their attempts to safeguard their income stream from competitors who have a much easier time curating their own walled garden, you should cease using Google Search on Mobile."
Thank you for this - it's a good summary.
I would go further and suggest a deeper bottom line - the desire of google/facebook/et.al to become "the phone company".
There was a long period of time when end users did not even own the telephone in their home and were not allowed to touch the wiring. We should act as if that level of control and captivity of the audience is the driving force behind the actions these firms take.
I use an older iPhone as my primary internet device when at home.
From google news, the top hits are served through amp and I lose about 1/10 of my screen area to a pointless blue "bar" underneath safari's address bar. This loss of screen space is the only reason I object to amp.
I also use a iPhone that is a few years old. My experience has been that Google sends me to AMP pages in Safari and scrolling literally doesn't work. It just does that springy thing (as if there is no more content) on both top and bottom.
What some may fail to see is that the Web's success in the smartphone/mobile era is not yet secure. Both Facebook and Apple, among others, have vested interest in treating the Web as competitive threat. I believe AMP was Google's response to Facebook's Instant Articles.
Although there is much to be concerned about Google's ever-expanding reach into the daily life of a good portion of the planet, I think web proponents have more to fear from the likes of FB, Apple, and others appearing on the horizon. These companies are mostly succeeding at meeting current UX expectations (performance, standardization, ease-of-use), and in doing so they are capturing eyeballs away from the web. It's possible some of those who have left for these walled gardens may not return.
!g has been my exclusive portal to Google for years (also on mobile). I never understood what all the rage was about until I went to try it in the "normal" Google. This is the first time I've seen that "lightning" icon. Wow.
So that's how it feels like to be a "lucky 10 000".
The ticket was closed a few days ago. People dislike stuff like AMP, but we are probably stuck with it, there just isn't much interest in alternatives.
I haven't read through the comments here yet but my initial impression of the article is 'ha, I was literally thinking this today'; because I was. AMP is a little heavy handed for my tasteS. Another instance of HN being on the same wave length I guess.
There's a lot of complaint about Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles, e.g. walled garden, anti-open-web and whatnot.
Here's something simpler from a non-developer, average-consumer point of view. I recently began taking BART to work daily (new job). For those who don't know, BART is Bay Area's subway system, and (at least on the east bay side) cell reception is notoriously spotty.
When I'm on the train, which includes 2 hours of my day everyday (unfortunately), I'd be browsing on say Facebook, and look at links that my friends post. Instant articles almost always load successfully (and quickly) and external links to actual sites almost always fails to load or loads insanely slowly.
Yes, when you're at home or in the city with good mobile reception, these things make no sense and you'd rather hit the original site directly. Give them their ad revenue, etc. to support them, right. But for the average consumers who actually have problems like slow internet (like the average joe who rides public transportation and wants to read on their phone), things like AMP and Instant Articles actually help. I can only imagine outside of silicon valley (where I live), how much more significant of a problem slow internet/slow mobile data actually is.
P.S. I don't work at Google or Facebook, and I know this sounds like propaganda, not to mention this is exactly what they would like to tell you as the "selling points" of these features, in order to continue building their walled garden empires. Fully aware of it, but I did want to bring up why they exist and why I even actually like them.
Yeah, but maybe there's a better way to get you your nice BART outcome, you know? I think that's really part of the pushback here. We haven't really given social permission for Google to convert the web to AMP by force.
> ...convert the web to AMP by force. @themodelplumber
Complete hyperbole. Google's not forcing anyone to use AMP. They're not forcing developers or users to use AMP.
There is no force. There is only usability. Users prefer usability. Developers prefer people use their products. If a user does not, or cannot, connect to the developer's product the developer loses. If a user cannot connect easily and speedily to a page, they will not consider the product.
I rock an LG V20 and I use Chrome mobile. AMP lets me connect to the content I wish to consume speedily and easily. I connect at a significantly faster rate than without AMP. Thus...
I <3 AMP. I don't care who controls it. As long as I can connect to the content I want, I'm good.
If you as a publisher want your content to show up in the carousel or top search results, you really have no choice but to use amp. It’s coercion if it’s not force.
Bullshit, Google forced my top hits to be AMP instead of the the web. If I had a way to get the web, I would have continued to use Google. But as a user, Google decided that I should not have the choice to opt out of AMP.
Exactly. You can ask Google/Facebook to provide hotspots inside trains, ask the network provider to make cell reception better inside the subway etc. There are ways to achieve a better outcome instead of locking down how you consume the internet.
So in your world, he should devote all of his time, money, and effort into getting multi-billion dollar corporations and massive bureaucracies to install millions of dollars of soon-to-be-outdated equipment in a massive urban transportation upgrade, instead of just clicking on the link that works?
Again, you are taking the suggestions too literally. What I simply suggest is a better alternative than AMP. Optimize pages better, improve their rendering engine, make better compression algorithms, complex CDN's or something which I can't even think of which makes pages snappier and better. I personally just don't agree with the AMP as a solution. I don't want to waste my time on explaining why as you can already see most of the downsides and my views are something like an union of most of them(you can start with the UX problems).
Also, just going with the solution that just works now is not always the best method going forward. It might be enough for you, but then again it isn't good enough for me.
Or instead of waiting few seconds, just get into the line of closed internet (let them monopolize it). It's the same like giving up the democracy for one-party system. Because if you stand out, you might heart yourself.
Nothing will you miss by missing few news. Try it, seriously!
We haven't really given social permission for Google to convert the web to AMP by force.
Google is not the problem here.
As a user this choice is not yours; you get what the publisher wants to publish. If a publisher chooses to build an AMP version of their content they are telling Google that's what they want you to see when you click through to a story they've published.
We, the users, don't get a say in this beyond choosing not to view the content from publishers who use AMP.
Convenience is not enough to make monopoly a right choice. This is a road towards monopoly (duopoly or just powerhouses holding the power - name it as you want it).
Yeah, many Google and FB services are great, but should you fully depend on them?
I love AMP as a user. So many sites have brutal load time and jumpy pages, popups and sometimes crashes.
As a developer I'm not a fan. It's another thing to manage and maintain. And the last time I checked once you can't leave without some serious consequences.
As a marketer I like the increased CTR but dislike the higher bounce rate and limited features.
Users: Like...the really slow ones? With all the annoying popovers? And pages that take forever to load? And for some reason cause my fancy new phone to slow to a crawl?
HN: Well, those websites should rewrite their entire codebase to be faster.
Users: That doesn't help me, though.
HN: Trust in the free market! The problem is you, the user, who just needs to exert more pressure on website purveyors so they'll make performant web sites.
Users: You mean, like, preferring websites that offer faster experiences? Okay. Continues to use AMP.
Your hypothetical there assumes that AMP actually works well. My experience is it's got painful usability issues at least on android chrome. The worst one I see all the time is scrolling down to actually read the AMP page frequently results in the page closing, returning you to results.
Fast is good, but at least it ought to be a good user experience. I used to use google news a lot, but i totally abandoned it after constant frustrating experiences with AMP. Plus most of the amp-ified pages don't seem significantly faster than the original page. I'm not seeing the utility for users, just for google.
I'm using an LG V20 device, with Chrome mobile, and I see a significant improvement with AMP'd pages over normal sites. So-much-so that I dread going to non-amped pages as they are slow and the ads are horrifically annoying.
I guess this is why anecdotal evidence is not as heavily weighed as a thoroughly tested and evidenced study.
Although AMP is not a performance beast by any measure, your experience is coloured because you're using Chrome on Android. Google news works pretty well on Samsung browser. It still annoys me that I can't see the link to the actual website but that's it.
So you're saying that Google's official browser is slow on their official web technology on their official mobile platform? And Samsung, who is well known for their software quality issues, is a better choice?
Well, he is speaking from experience. While this isn't the place for speaking from experience but more about enabling a better experience for all users he cannot deny what he has observed. However the user above us had the correct answer with filing a bug / legitimate issue with devs. That is the only way to increase usability for all users.
I thought this was common knowledge. Chrome is horrible on Android. If you look at benchmarks, the only browser/phone combination that is close to iPhone Safari performance is the latest galaxy flagship running Samsung Internet.
Samsung's browser (and several other competitors) are faster on Android because they contain closed source rendering that's customised for their chipsets. Google can't integrate the closed source code into Chrome because they'd effectively have to fork it from Chromium to do so.
Doesn't Chrome already contain close source code? I thought it was chromium plus Google proprietary code. For example, some features are available only on Chrome (DRM etc. "features"). If they wanted, they could optimise for a selected few top selling devices.
If you have specific issues you can spell out, consider filing a bug on it[0]? The AMP team is tracking most of their work via Github as far as I'm aware.
As an iOS user, one bug that bothered me for a long time with AMP was scroll inertia, which seems to be an issue with Webkit rather than AMP[1]. If you poke around the tracker, you can see the team does what it can to fix issues across all platforms/browsers.
Funny that AMP just happened to use some sort of page structure that triggered an iOS bug that >99.9% of the rest of the web does not trigger...
What are the chances that Google would listen to big reports, supposing that anybody could find those links? Google is notorious for being inaccessible unless you happen to know an employee personally or have enough juice on twitter. They do not have a reputation as an open or accessible company.
AMP is also literally breaking internet. People share google.com/amp links,sometimes there'd be no preview and hard telling what the actual website being linked is.
Google can (or refuse to) redirect you anywhere. They also get to know about it, in case the analytics on target page was not enough.
That said, I don’t actually agree that AMP’s link rewriting is necessarily the thing that breaks internet, because the original link is still contained in the modified URL, and can be recovered completely offline.
URL shorteneres are much more harmful in that aspect.
The real danger of AMP is giving Google that much (more) power. They don’t hide links today, but what stops them from turning evil(er) tomorrow.
Preferring AMP pages is a clear monopoly practice, and should be the straw that breaks the camel’s back (if you didn’t care about the censorship…). I’m really trying to have faith in free market sorting this out, but I don’t have much faith in the Facebook drones that brought us all this shit in the first place. Are there enough free people left?
On safari I get nothing except AMP links in google and cannot get myself routed to the actual site even with extensive searching. This disables sharing the link for me as well.
Have you considered switching search engines? I've been using https://duckduckgo.com for the last two years and this is the first time I'm hearing of Google AMP.
I really really really want to use DuckDuckGo.com but the search results are probably 10% as helpful as Google. As a developer it's nearly impossible to find a really specific answer using ddg whereas google will have 3 super-relevant links.
> The worst one I see all the time is scrolling down to actually read the AMP page frequently results in the page closing, returning you to results.
Fast is good, but at least it ought to be a good user experience. I used to use google news a lot, but i totally abandoned it
I use "request desktop site" on google news to get that working properly on my android.
I personally don't see any major improvements in speed when using AMP. It might be marginal but too small to notice for a regular user. Another factor can be that AMP might work better on Chrome which is again Google sucking you into their ecosystem.
I get the feeling it's aimed mainly at all the crappy bottom-of-the-barrel Android devices out there.
As an iPhone user, why the hell would I care if a page is bit larger, I pull down over 500Mbit/s on wifi and over 100Mbit/s on LTE. The CPU in iPhone is so fast it's almost ridiculous. There is little difference in how fast AMP pages load compared to real web pages.
Basically, Google re-invented WAP for exactly the same, dumb, reasons the original WAP was invented: their phones are too shit to use the real web.
iPhone is no better...when I was developing a web site, I bought an iPhone 4 as a testing device, and it was quite painful to use compared to my Samsung S7 Edge (and quite slow).
I bought it because it was still used heavily in the user base.
An iPhone 4 is an ancient and no longer supported device, it's 7 years old, an eternity in the mobile market. You're comparing a 2010 device to a 2016 one.
People who have perfectly functional iPhones 4 deserve to use the web too. Forcing people to pay huge premium just to keep the same functionality is messed up
> People who have perfectly functional iPhones 4 deserve to use the web too.
An iPhone 4 isn't perfectly functional. It's an outdated device that is no longer getting security updates and as such should not be used on the open web.
Let me take a guess: you are a regular user, so probably you're in rural China with your 4 year old mobile phone that you got for $100 back then. Or you are in India (30% yearly mobile growth) with your shiny new $30 phone, loading a big web page of a web site in U.S., and you still don't see any difference?
Which is funny, because Google Amp was a piece of shit when it was called the Digg toolbar and users hated it, and it was even worse as the Alexa browser toolbar spyware, and users really hated it. Amp has some pretty dressing but amounts to the same thing.
As a user, I like the "fast" part, but I absolutely hate the user experience. I haven't quite figured out how Back works when you're in the "AMP experience", but it's definitely not how it's supposed to work in a browser.
Not if you have opened the article from the carousel (when you can swipe left/right between articles related to the topic you searched for). In that case, Back doesn't bring you back to the previous article - it closes the current article, and brings back the search results page.
I mean, if you take AMP to it's logical conclusion why should Google allow anyone to host their own webpages when Google can host them all better and faster.
The point of AMP is everyone can host their own pages, and anyone who wants to can host their own AMP cache. So, no, your description isn't taking AMP to it's logical conclusion, it's extrapolating a distortion of AMP.
AMP has been created for product managers. Everybody in a project knows that slow and bloated pages hurt users, but business requirements are making it impossible to do otherwise. Google AMP solves this problem, in an authoritarian way (hence the outrage), by defining what's good and bad for the Internet.
Marketing has taken the lead in corporate websites projects to the detriment of the end-users, AMP puts the user in the center.
As user, AMP makes my life hell. It made me change nearly two decades of search engine loyalty because Google decided to embrace extend and extinguish. Screw those assholes for breaking the back button, accidentally scrolling to the side, and URLs. I mean, I hate outlook and office with a passion, but the AMP team has somehow produced something even worse: take a monopoly and forced a terrible UI and experience in a huge number of users. Every memeber of the team should be thinking of how they can spin their time at Google as being not related to AMP. Such crap, and such a bad direction for the Google experience.
Exactly. I read a good article where Google is basically admitting to being "bad cop", in other words product managers and devs often try to push back against "please just add my one more shitty ad and pixel tracking library" from marketing and business teams, but AMP gives them the power to just say "sorry, that's not technically possible with AMP".
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 339 ms ] threadBut given the URL format, it should be trivial for a browser extensions to rewrite links or requests from AMP pages to the original. I bet it already exists.
Google is no longer neutral, they own those users, not you.
As a website designer (barely), basically the same reasons: I don't want my site under control of a third party, I don't want my users to have to run javascript to view my site, and I don't want them to have to consent to (possibly) being tracked. Most ironically, my site probably accomplishes more of the stated AMP goals (due to being pure html and light) than it would when AMPed up.
Quick edit: I also worry it can contribute to breaking or obfuscating hyperlinks, which is similar to the issue raised in this article. Having hyperlinks work correctly is crucial to the design of the web. I had similar problems when sites like Google search started making their search links redirect to some intermediate site before going to the actual link, and back when I used Google search I had an extension that removed them so I could e.g. right-click and copy the link.
Probably not 100%, but it's better than nothing. And having people install a plugin is easy enough.
An example is off-main-thread animations. There's no intrinsic reason why animating, say, background-color should be slow. A lot of sites empirically do this sort of thing. But that animation is banned in AMP [1], because it's slow in Chrome (and in other browsers). Even if I work on making it faster, it'll stay banned until Chrome catches up (due to Chrome's market share), thus negating the incentive to make it faster in the first place. Without this competition, Web developers and users lose.
[1]: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-ani...
Because of that I'm starting to seriously wonder if Google is going to end up declaring AMP a failed project (and, being Google, the prior probability was reasonably high in the first place), and then AMP is an uncleanable stain on the web, with www.google.com/amp/ URLs being kept around forever.
This is just one of many reasons, but try this on a mobile phone.
Go to Google and search for "Trump"
Note what choices you have to pick from without excessive scrolling. They all end in either ads or Google urls.
Click one of the featured stories in the carousel, almost guaranteed to be an AMP site. Seems to be a prerequisite to sit in the carousel.
Lets say you land on a Washington Post story. What do you think a "right swipe" should do? Should it navigate to a competitor of Wapo? This is Wapo's page, right? So it should go to another Wapo page. Nope, it goes to Fox News.
Okay, so now you've navigated from Wapo to say Fox News. Hit the back button. It should go back to the Wapo story, right? Nope, goes back to Google.
How this isn't viewed as a land grab is a mystery to me.
It certainly makes it clear that the content owner of an AMP page is not the page owner.
Also, I missed mentioning the [X] button on the AMP header banner. I bet that most end users think that [X] button should make the AMP banner disappear, while leaving the page content there. Pretty common pattern, like for the EU cookie warning. That's not what it does, though.
Back to the "right swipe", at the very least, it should do nothing, assuming that an AMP page belongs to the publisher.
Dark petterns, MS, google, facebook etc. It's becoming the norm for the behemoth corporations to do this.
You mention the [X] button. How many end users do you suppose think that the [X] on the AMP header bar should make the header bar go away...versus functioning like a back button, going all the way back to the google search? I suspect they are conditioned by things like the EU cookie warnings that an [X] on a header bar makes it go away.
An AMP page you reach from a Google search is Google's page, period. It's not the publisher's page. And that's no accident or side effect. It's the whole point. Performance is a secondary concern.
I googled "Trump". First five stories in carousel (wapo, bbc et all) are not AMP. I see only one AMP link in the first page results. Click on it, page loads. Swipe right/back button gets me to Google results (as expected). Is it because I'm on an iPhone and this is an Android thing?
Same search though ddg with !g comes out completely different though....
Well, with AMP, the the mobile results are basically ads, then AMP results which are guaranteed to have Google ads. So the percentage of searches makes Google money increases while similar reducing revenue from competitive ad networks who are not approved.
Sign up, or face the reduced google referral traffic as AMP-only carousel results push the organic results below the fold.
The content that user gets on their browser is cached content hosted on Google's servers.
The URL that is shown in the location bar is `www.google.com/amp/<site>`.
The rapid adoption is primarily due to fear of being left behind in Google's search ranking.
As the blog states, it drives mobile views away from the site whose content is being shown (some call it stealing).
On occasions I've seen more "Suggested Content" on an AMP page than the actual site.
From what I've read, AMP came as a response to Facebook's instant articles not primarily driven from user needs.
They state "I just automatically go to the main url" without giving any real reason for it. They also mention how all studies show that it's a huge positive for users. And it is. It's much faster and easier way to browse content. You can try to shit on Google, but the reality is that people sucked at making fast content, so someone had to step in and no one was.
There is also some discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14518985
And more links in these articles:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider...
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson-amp
This author notes that they "feel bad" about consuming AMP content. Which is extremely weird given that content creators intentionally volunteer their content to AMP (aside from this user who got famous claiming that Google was stealing their content because they had enabled a Wordpress plug-in haphazardly).
If Google blacklisted non-AMP content, or even just deranked it, sure there's an argument, but as of yet this notion that it's some content theft is quite strange.
Google's intention with AMP is obvious, and obviously not anti-web: Facebook is becoming a primary medium where users are accessing a lot of content. I personally read all news via Facebook now, where they've integrated it heavily with a built-in browser and now instant articles (Facebook's AMP). Compared to this, the traditional web is just an obnoxious mess, not because of the web but because of the abuse that AMP restricts.
Doesn't Google already admit to prioritising AMP pages in search results?
https://moz.com/blog/google-amp-search-results https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/07/06/is-google-amp-a-ran...
[just to be clear, just because you read it in some HN thread doesn't make it true. Let's see a single citation that it actually influences ranking]
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-i...
There was a vicious spiral at work related to advertisers not caring enough about page load, and adding that signal was not enough. AMP shifted the game by placing the burden on Google of specifying a way to hit advertisers' goals while offering a faster experience.
And AMP pages are hosted on a Google CDN. They are very clearly putting their thumb on the scale.
Perhaps my results could have been loading faster? I'm not willing to make a deal with the devil to find out. I'm pretty satisfied with what I have now.
Google is taking the content and serving it themselves.
The problem is sites being slow in the first place, but Apple isn't commandeering the content itself like Google is by creating a mode where the browser can enhance legibility of any article.
Content authors voluntarily publish their content in AMP form, so it doesn't seem fair to say that they commandeer anything: AMP is a subset of HTML intended for a fast mobile experience, and if you decide to take part you publish flags allowing Google to cache it. Google isn't unilaterally converting content to AMP.
The core argument against AMP primarily seems to be a fear that users will actually prefer AMP content. Which is ultimately rather anti-user.
How on earth did you arrive to that conclusion?
How is Google taking the content? Isn't it the creator that is publishing their content using AMP?
AMP is garbage, and honestly whoever signed off on it shouldn't have a position at Google or wider tech community.
https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/faq#can-i-stop-conte...
None of that requires being hosted by google.
AMP is a subset because in addition to the elements, they provide a set of restrictions that would make your page "valid AMP" and cached by Google's creepy CDN thingy.
Caching is a part of the platform and is entirely coherent with the goals, and if you want analytics or ads, you approach those in a different way. AMP caching isn't limited to Google - Bing, for instance, caches and serves AMP as well. Ultimately anyone could, and HN could cache and quick-serve AMP content for supporting sources. AMP is open source and any one can take part.
I should add a side note that many of the comments on here have taken the predictable turn of claiming that people who defend AMP are "over invested" or must work at Google. I have nothing to do with Google, and have a reasoned, fact-based opinion on AMP. I think it's a last-ditch salvation for a web where sites are demonstrating a tragedy of the commons. Nor do I think everyone denouncing AMP works for Apple or some competitor.
What I dislike is not being able to choose simply to make and host an AMP content myself without google taking it and hosting it on their own servers. I cannot opt-in to this, nor can I opt-out. My only choice is to not do anything with AMP.
What is the way to host your own AMP cache? The AMP project under caching just shows the google cache and links to a google page.
As a side note, what if what I publish is not acceptable by google? Will they remove my content, despite having already taken it and given it to people under that URL? If AMP content must be loaded from the caches, is my content only valid AMP if google and the jurisdictions they operate under approve?
And many of those media sites use Instant Articles (Facebook's AMP) and honestly I've found that I greatly prefer them, because it really sucks to click a story and have an abomination that grinds my device to a halt, starts a hidden autoplay video, etc. The same forces are at play: Controlling sites that destroy the web by making it such a miserable experience.
This comment is applicable to all media sources: replace "fb's algos" with any newspaper, website, or TV channel name. You might want to be careful of sourcing your news from one single source instead.
This extension is great: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
This is certainly not true. The reason no many content creators and publishers moved to AMP is to not hurt their SEO. If you check most of the AMP articles targeted to publishers, it's addressed as get on the AMP wagon now or else you are doomed when Google starts ranking AMP pages higher.
Oh but it's entirely true. If you buy the conspiracies and allusions of the anti-AMP crowd, there should be some sort of citation you can leverage. As is, the primary real concern among those who denounce AMP is that users will prefer it. Which is a pretty bizarre thing to fight against.
Amp obviously ranks higher it is the top hit in search for me. Results appear under it...
Second, even if that does happen, the question is whether it would have happened without AMP. In other words, is it a bug in the search algorithm, independent of AMP.
It isn't just a matter of the AMP results being ranked higher — they are segmented from non-AMP pages. The eleven (!) "Top Stories" are all AMP pages.
Under that is "People also searched for > WWDC iPhone 8", which consists of five (!) AMP pages.
Only then does it go into non-AMP pages, starting with Apple's own WWDC page. That's not just rank prioritization. There is a visual break between AMP and non-AMP pages.
It is crazier for you to blindly trust Google on this than it is for us to infer from a pattern we see over and over again, and for you to require that we provide proof that you acknowledge we can't obtain might be crazier.
That's not really how arguments work. I mean, sure, sometimes it works that way, but other times, like this time, one person is clearly in the wrong, and is simply refusing to listen to the other side.
You're confusing an important thing here: Google places news higher than the original source. Given that WWDC is over, this is actually preferable. It is true that all the news results are AMPed, but there was certainly a time when not everyone was onboard yet and the carousel included non-AMP results (I assume if you can find a news topic sufficiently obscure to have a non-AMP publisher, yet important enough for Top Stories it might show up).
If you instead search for "Iceland hikes" you get a useful one box of info, then an AMPed page then a non-AMPed result and so on.
tl;dr: Popular news publications are certainly all AMPified these days, and Top News is clearly prioritized. Regular search results aren't as clearly AMP leaning.
The goal is to get all the content onto google servers so they can serve ads from the same origin that cannot be blocked.
Amp in combination with chrome's built in "ad blocker" is part of a broader Google strategy to protect their advertising model.
Not everyone is on board. Many sites don't want AMPified pages. Google takes AMP pages and puts a giant "back" button that takes the website's users back to Google Search rather than deeper into the website.
It breaks URLs and referrers, because the AMP pages are now hosted on google.com, not on the destination websites' own domains.
AMP is a terrible attack on the open WWW. Google is saying, let us appify your content on our own platform (not on your own independent website) and restrict your markup/monitization options or we will drop you out of the top spot of the rankings.
This post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14536679) is an example of how AMP works. Someone has shared a link on HN. It's an AMP link, but I'm reading it on my laptop, and it's still AMP.
The end result is that all users (desktop too) are getting sent to an appified version of the page that restricts advertising/monetization options and markup options. It seems unlikely that the people who designed AMP were unaware of how this would work in practice.
I think that the core motivation for AMP has little to do with speeding up the Web, but is more about ensuring that Google's ads are delivered and so they have some say in which ad competitors are locked out.
It would be interesting to find out how much total traffic ends up on AMP pages, broken down by device type.
Restricted AMP version from the HN link: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-sues-former-aws-vp-non-...
HTML version: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-sues-former-aws-vp-non-...
The most glaringly obvious change is that you never leave google now. There's a nice little wrapper around the site with a back button that leads you straight back to google without even a page reload.
Oh but AMP isn't evil because it's open source. Open source but if you change a single byte in any file it doesn't verify anymore and arguably is no longer AMP.
Google wasn't even planning to show the original URL at all until people made a shitload of noise about it. And it took a month to add because reasons??? It surely looks like quite a difficult feature to implement, showing a URL and all. It must have been quite challenging.
I also enjoy the feature that there's no way to shut AMP off. Why would anyone want to? Maybe this is also to difficult a task for the AMP team to implement.
Don't let the haters demotivate you :)
An acquaintance of mine was complaining that Google didn't give him a way to opt his site out of AMP. If he's right, that's a bad move on Google's part. Google should let web site owners choose to not have their content served from google.com.
When I come across an AMP search result on my phone, I'm happy, because I know it will load, and load instantly. Web pages often don't load on cellular internet in India, and a web that works is more important to me than one that's "open". Not to mention that openness is ultimately about accessibility, and if hundreds of millions of people can't access it reliably, it's not open. You may not be able to relate to this since you're based in a developed country, where the Internet works reliably.
Maybe Google is acting in users' best interests, but not site owners'.
My view about AMP is more nuanced than a binary yes/no. Reducing it to a binary choice throws the baby out with the bathwater. Maybe you have a different view, in which case I again respect it, but we should agree to disagree.
Searching "wwdc iphone 8" (not in the "people also searched" list for me) yields about 50% AMP pages. The first result is but the second isn't.
I don't really see a pattern here. The only part where AMP seems mandatory is the news carousel.
Unless you have solid evidence to the contrary, I see no reason to believe you over believing Google.
"Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski already recreated the Google AMP demo page without the Google AMP JavaScript and, unsurprisingly, it's faster than Google's version."
I'd have a lot less problems with it if it didn't break my zoom functionality.
A purely local feature that you have to select manually and doesn't infringe on your privacy or break the ability to share links.
It's pretty clear, I think, Apple would've approached this just like they did reading mode.
I found this comment interesting as well. I really like the instant load aspect and would much rather not waste time waiting for a slow page to load.
I think the author feels that the free hosting provided by AMP is overshadowed by the loss of personal ad revenue from the traffic.
They do kind of do this. AMP pages get highlighted and populate the top results( at least for me) which kind of has the same effect as reducing the rank of normal websites.
There's the AMP library and format. That is a huge part of what you're talking about with speed, annoying popups, etc. It's an open source library and people can use it or not.
Then there's Google grabbing all of the AMP pages, rewriting them and putting them on a Google domain.
You cannot opt out of the second part. There's not a lot of abuse I can think of that's being restricted by this, and it feels like it would be a simple problem to fix.
I'm not using it too, but not because of that (and I was unaware of amp before). DDG shows instant wiki, stackoverflow, lyrics previews, while google only does that for wiki. I don't use gmail because of crappy ui, ux and designs. I wouldn't use annoying youtube if dailymotion was not blocked. Translate is only bearable for english. Local maps are way better in navigation/street/company info (probably not true for US/EU).
Summarizing, I clearly see no value in google services for me today and it was surprisingly easy to get rid of it completely.
Edit: and in search regard, ddg/yahoo links lag far less than google's redirects and ddg never presented me "you're a robot, enter captcha to not get to our search service anyway" for hours.
Other services were mentioned only to support "completely" part, which is criticism, but not search-related.
For searches in specific domains it is better to use bangs. For example prefixing with !py shows results from python manual.
Here's more about it: https://duckduckgo.com/bang
Liking it so far, really liking being able to attach my domains natively to my inbox
https://imgur.com/a/V9I4o
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cucumber%20chef%20salad&sort=b...
Upd: and https://github.com/asciimoo/searx
Another thing you can do is use alternative browsers. On mobile I use Firefox Mobile, which has the benefit of allowing extensions, so you can install uBlock Origin! That makes a gigantic different in mobile web performance. On my laptop I've been using Safari as my main browser because it consumes far less memory, and it seems to handle mountains of tabs a lot better than Chrome.
Sometimes though, I do have problems finding what I'm looking for (when it is obscure) so I pre-pend !g in front, but generally it's not much better ...
Except scientific articles. I've yet to find a service that comes anywhere close to Google Scholar, which I think is the most successful of their products for my use case.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22webpack+3%22&atb=v49-4&ia=web
But yeah, saw that I had south africa enabled. Still makes little sense but explains a bit why the result is so weird.
The only options are: Google, Bing, AOL, Yahoo, Ask.
To get DDG you'll need to use a different browser like FF.
I actually blocked Chrome on my phone and started using FF once I noticed that Chrome was updating itself even though I was requiring manual updates. Play Store and Google Play Services do the same thing, but don't have a good alternative for them,
> AOL & Yahoo is really Bing What? I don't get that -- I don't know about AOL, but I thought that Yahoo does its own crawling (their Slurp bot)
Yahoo's search business was always odd... They had their own search, then switched to search powered by Google. Then they purchased Overture, which owned AlltheWeb and AltaVista. Overture had originally purchased AlltheWeb from FAST, who had pivoted into the enterprise space, and later got bought by Microsoft and integrated into SharePoint.
The !commands allow you to search more specific sites directly - if I know I want Wikipedia, which I often do, I can just type !w and search it directly. Similar for other things like IMBD, Wolfram Alpha, etc. It's just a convenience.
You can also search Google using a command, which is sometimes necessary when you're really crawling the depths of the internet for something old or weird, but nine times out of ten the straight DDG results will get you where you need in my experience.
I was a heavy user of address bar search prefixes, but it's amazingly convenient to not have to think about it until the very end of a query (or even add it in the middle).
I get the idea behind AMP but it's just far too late to the game for Google to be pushing it so heavily. Back on 2G internet I used Opera Mini, I don't use that now because I just don't need it anymore
AMP is so much faster than 90% of websites 90% of the time I can see why Google push it so much.
AMP pages don't work offline just as much as regular internet
For example this mobile speed test puts theverge.com at 21 seconds to load! That matches my experience. You can't tell me AMP is as slow as that. It's not even close.
https://gtmetrix.com/reports/theverge.com/Qli1RH8u
In my experience AMP pages load in 2-3 seconds, even with bad signal.
https://www.maketecheasier.com/assets/uploads/2014/09/avoid-...
http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2012/01/...
In terms of "a worse place", well, as a user, I disagree. I wish it wasn't necessary but it clearly is.
Seems like the link you found is outdated.
The AMP saga has pretty clearly shown that users care about content while Web developers only care about URLs and what goes over the wire. This is a huge disconnect. It doesn't help that many Web developers show no empathy for the users' viewpoint.
Ultimately it probably is easier for Google to add an opt-out to appease a very small, very vocal minority than to educate them that the URL doesn't matter.
I fully agree that it should be optional and people who dislike it should be allowed to disable it. But as you mention, the author provide absolutely no real argument other than "it feels wrong".
All user studies so far show that it's a net positive, and I'd rather stick to real data than feelings or anectodes.
I personally love it, but I also agree that those who don't should be allowed to disable it.
Some people expressed a valid criticism that just saying “doesn’t feel right” is not good enough. While I agree, I don’t have any solid data to back up my argument. I believe AMP (to some extent) is a hack on top of existing browsers and the Web, to create a faster in-browser “browser”. As a result a number of small things (scrolling etc) don’t work on my iPhone as I would normally expect. Considering that this post received over 1000 up-votes on Hacker News, making it one of the top 300 posts of all time, leads me to believe that I am not alone.
I don't think I've ever seen an AMP-enabled website, I certainly never noticed any buttons suggesting I visit the original website.
But if you search on a mobile device, you'll get this for the OP: https://www.alexkras.com/please-make-google-amp-optional/amp...
If they solved the URL issue somehow(even if faking the address bar), and had original and AMP links in search; it would probably reduce the antiAMP argument quite a bit. Which both seem to be just UI issues.
Google's attitude that it's "your page" despite the URL and header is complete BS. They clearly hijack it for their own benefit.
Worst of all I was on the website the other day where I couldn't use pinch to zoom without it moving me to a different page. It was literally impossible to zoom into the content.
I can't stand all these things where websites seem to try to invente the features that are already built into mobile phones. "Will make a bar that makes it easy to share this!" I can ALREADY share things easily on my phone. And it doesn't waste 10% of my screen at all times. Also, I can configure at the way I want.
No, AMP is basically WAP 3.0. A crippled, baby version of the internet invented because most Android devices are too slow to offer a decent browsing experience otherwise. Which is fine for the people who need it, but Google has to stop forcing it down everyone else's throat.
It's "genie"
Personally prefer the faster speed with AMP.
Most search features are completely removed, and this also includes AMP. Others are search filters, for example.
This alone should be enough to warrant a close examination of Googles practices, let's say by the EU.
After all, most people on mobile spend their time inside apps, probably from some Google competitor like Facebook. Within these apps, they click on links, which increasingly load inside webviews; the framing app collects info on where people go, and uses this to sell targeted advertising. Facebook is a king in this space, and is now the second largest server of internet display ads, after Google.
Google's assault on Facebook's encroachment is twofold: drive people to Google's apps like the Google Now Launcher (now the default launcher on Android) or the Google app present in older versions of Android and available for iOS, and deploy the same content-framing techniques from their own search engine webpage on mobile user-agents, where the competition is most fierce, and they can also position it as legitimate UX improvement -- which, to their credit, is largely true, as bigpub content sites on mobile were usually usability nightmares and cesspits of ads.
I understand that the author and quite a few others are peeved at this behavior and that there's no way of turning it off. But it's really not in Google's best interest to even offer the option, because then many people will just turn it off, encouraged by articles like the author's own last year where he was caught off-guard and before he gained a more nuanced appreciation for what's really going on.
The bottom line is this: Google is inseparable from its ad-serving and adtech business -- it is after all how they make most of their money -- so if you are bothered by their attempts to safeguard their income stream from competitors who have a much easier time curating their own walled garden, you should cease using Google Search on Mobile. There are other alternatives, who may not be as thorough at search, but that's the cost of the tradeoff.
This is not the default launcher on Android. Each OEM has their own launcher. It's also not even the default launcher in AOSP for obvious reasons.
I don't want your stupid "mobile" website that doesn't work, your cut-down "optimized" walled-garden product.
I just want the normal web, in all its glory.
What's even worse is that Google is pushing Chrome tabs in process now: https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/android/customtabs
So in all the biggest apps like Gmail, Slack, etc. I now have to click a link and it shows up in process, then I have to pick the menu option to view it in real Chrome, then I have to pick the menu option to request desktop site. So they've added two clicks and two page loads to almost every site I visit.
It's very easy to assume that everyone has the latest device in an affluent society that doesn't have much of a problem buying the latest and greatest, but I can assure you this isn't the case in most of the world.
You're failing to see that Google is used everywhere in the world and not all countries (in fact, very few) have markets where the standard device is what you describe or where everyone has blazing fast LTE available everywhere.
For example, there are places here in Colombia where 2G is the norm, that's the kind of people AMP is helping, not the bay area kid that has the latest iPhone and 100Mb Wi-Fi
Such luxuries. I spent several years reading web pages on a 33MHz 386DX with 8MB of RAM. Yes, Netscape took a while to start (had to wait for the rest of Win 3.1 to swap out), and downloading images was always somewhere between "slow" and "don't bother" even with the glorious 14.4kbps of a fancy V.32bis modem[1]. However, it still only took a few (15-20) seconds to fetch an article and render it.
The slowness started when websites decided it was fashionable to add a few dozen unnecessary HTTP requests to fetch megabytes of Javascript. The bloat is self inflicted, and websites do not need Google's help to make their pages small and fast. Unfortunately, many pages value the bloated ad loaders and trackers, several types of spyware ("analytics"), and their favorite "framework" more than they value the actual content of the page or the reader's experience. Google is happy to pretend the problem isn't self-inflicted when it gives them more tracking data.
Yes, it's important to remember that there will always be a wide variation in the User Agent. That's one of the reasons well-designed websites progressively enhance the heavier features. Websites can do this on their own - just like they did 10/15/20 years ago. An over-engineered caching system isn't necessary. Do you want a future where the internet retains some of it's interactive, decentralized qualities? Or do you want a fancier version of Cable TV, mostly controlled by Google et al?
[1] On weekends I was stuck with the old 2400bps V.22bis hand-me-down.
So here's an idea: Seeing as some folks _do_ have these powerful devices and fast connections, Google could make AMP _optional_.
Let people enable AMP browsing if they need it.
So Googles solution is to pull everyone down to the lowest common denominator, which is shit. Google basically re-invented WAP and is trying to set the web back 15 years.
Sure, not everyone has a fast connection and a high-end device, but they could have easily limited AMP to just those devices instead of forcing it down everyones throat.
You left out the most important reasoning for AMP, which is the network. Even in the US, cellular networks are almost invariably slower/higher latency/less reliable than wired (or even wifi) networks. In other areas of the world where most users are not on 4g it's a huge difference.
You're making excuses for Google, but forgetting about smaller, independent companies. It is not in our interests to have our content appified and restricted inside of Google's walled garden. When a big company like Google (or its competitors) attacks the open WWW, then web publishers should oppose it.
Thank you for this - it's a good summary.
I would go further and suggest a deeper bottom line - the desire of google/facebook/et.al to become "the phone company".
There was a long period of time when end users did not even own the telephone in their home and were not allowed to touch the wiring. We should act as if that level of control and captivity of the audience is the driving force behind the actions these firms take.
From google news, the top hits are served through amp and I lose about 1/10 of my screen area to a pointless blue "bar" underneath safari's address bar. This loss of screen space is the only reason I object to amp.
Although there is much to be concerned about Google's ever-expanding reach into the daily life of a good portion of the planet, I think web proponents have more to fear from the likes of FB, Apple, and others appearing on the horizon. These companies are mostly succeeding at meeting current UX expectations (performance, standardization, ease-of-use), and in doing so they are capturing eyeballs away from the web. It's possible some of those who have left for these walled gardens may not return.
I !g maybe 5% of the time.
So that's how it feels like to be a "lucky 10 000".
crawls back under stone
The ticket was closed a few days ago. People dislike stuff like AMP, but we are probably stuck with it, there just isn't much interest in alternatives.
;)
Here's something simpler from a non-developer, average-consumer point of view. I recently began taking BART to work daily (new job). For those who don't know, BART is Bay Area's subway system, and (at least on the east bay side) cell reception is notoriously spotty.
When I'm on the train, which includes 2 hours of my day everyday (unfortunately), I'd be browsing on say Facebook, and look at links that my friends post. Instant articles almost always load successfully (and quickly) and external links to actual sites almost always fails to load or loads insanely slowly.
Yes, when you're at home or in the city with good mobile reception, these things make no sense and you'd rather hit the original site directly. Give them their ad revenue, etc. to support them, right. But for the average consumers who actually have problems like slow internet (like the average joe who rides public transportation and wants to read on their phone), things like AMP and Instant Articles actually help. I can only imagine outside of silicon valley (where I live), how much more significant of a problem slow internet/slow mobile data actually is.
P.S. I don't work at Google or Facebook, and I know this sounds like propaganda, not to mention this is exactly what they would like to tell you as the "selling points" of these features, in order to continue building their walled garden empires. Fully aware of it, but I did want to bring up why they exist and why I even actually like them.
Complete hyperbole. Google's not forcing anyone to use AMP. They're not forcing developers or users to use AMP.
There is no force. There is only usability. Users prefer usability. Developers prefer people use their products. If a user does not, or cannot, connect to the developer's product the developer loses. If a user cannot connect easily and speedily to a page, they will not consider the product.
I rock an LG V20 and I use Chrome mobile. AMP lets me connect to the content I wish to consume speedily and easily. I connect at a significantly faster rate than without AMP. Thus...
I <3 AMP. I don't care who controls it. As long as I can connect to the content I want, I'm good.
If you as a publisher want your content to show up in the carousel or top search results, you really have no choice but to use amp. It’s coercion if it’s not force.
I am being forced to use AMP because I have no way to tell my search results to link to the real content
Just the tip bruh.
Millennial thinking.
Also, just going with the solution that just works now is not always the best method going forward. It might be enough for you, but then again it isn't good enough for me.
Nothing will you miss by missing few news. Try it, seriously!
Google is not the problem here.
As a user this choice is not yours; you get what the publisher wants to publish. If a publisher chooses to build an AMP version of their content they are telling Google that's what they want you to see when you click through to a story they've published.
We, the users, don't get a say in this beyond choosing not to view the content from publishers who use AMP.
Yeah, many Google and FB services are great, but should you fully depend on them?
As a developer I'm not a fan. It's another thing to manage and maintain. And the last time I checked once you can't leave without some serious consequences.
As a marketer I like the increased CTR but dislike the higher bounce rate and limited features.
HN: But the open Internet!
Users: What's that?
HN: Normal websites!
Users: Like...the really slow ones? With all the annoying popovers? And pages that take forever to load? And for some reason cause my fancy new phone to slow to a crawl?
HN: Well, those websites should rewrite their entire codebase to be faster.
Users: That doesn't help me, though.
HN: Trust in the free market! The problem is you, the user, who just needs to exert more pressure on website purveyors so they'll make performant web sites.
Users: You mean, like, preferring websites that offer faster experiences? Okay. Continues to use AMP.
>It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Fast is good, but at least it ought to be a good user experience. I used to use google news a lot, but i totally abandoned it after constant frustrating experiences with AMP. Plus most of the amp-ified pages don't seem significantly faster than the original page. I'm not seeing the utility for users, just for google.
I'm using an LG V20 device, with Chrome mobile, and I see a significant improvement with AMP'd pages over normal sites. So-much-so that I dread going to non-amped pages as they are slow and the ads are horrifically annoying.
I guess this is why anecdotal evidence is not as heavily weighed as a thoroughly tested and evidenced study.
YMMV
I <3 AMP
Bugwise though I've had the same issues over a couple of different phones.
If you have specific issues you can spell out, consider filing a bug on it[0]? The AMP team is tracking most of their work via Github as far as I'm aware.
As an iOS user, one bug that bothered me for a long time with AMP was scroll inertia, which seems to be an issue with Webkit rather than AMP[1]. If you poke around the tracker, you can see the team does what it can to fix issues across all platforms/browsers.
[0] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues
[1] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/5125
Solution: Remove banner, redirect to URL
Resolution: Closed, Google likes it that way.
Actual solution: Don't use AMP, and slowly get pushed out of Google search.
What are the chances that Google would listen to big reports, supposing that anybody could find those links? Google is notorious for being inaccessible unless you happen to know an employee personally or have enough juice on twitter. They do not have a reputation as an open or accessible company.
How is this breaking the internet?
That said, I don’t actually agree that AMP’s link rewriting is necessarily the thing that breaks internet, because the original link is still contained in the modified URL, and can be recovered completely offline.
URL shorteneres are much more harmful in that aspect.
The real danger of AMP is giving Google that much (more) power. They don’t hide links today, but what stops them from turning evil(er) tomorrow.
Preferring AMP pages is a clear monopoly practice, and should be the straw that breaks the camel’s back (if you didn’t care about the censorship…). I’m really trying to have faith in free market sorting this out, but I don’t have much faith in the Facebook drones that brought us all this shit in the first place. Are there enough free people left?
Anecdotal, but I've never had this happen to me. Chrome on Nexus 6P 7.1.2
I agree with the fundamental and structural concerns associated with it though.
Is there anything you're doing on your connection that's unusual?
I use "request desktop site" on google news to get that working properly on my android.
As an iPhone user, why the hell would I care if a page is bit larger, I pull down over 500Mbit/s on wifi and over 100Mbit/s on LTE. The CPU in iPhone is so fast it's almost ridiculous. There is little difference in how fast AMP pages load compared to real web pages.
Basically, Google re-invented WAP for exactly the same, dumb, reasons the original WAP was invented: their phones are too shit to use the real web.
I bought it because it was still used heavily in the user base.
An iPhone 4 isn't perfectly functional. It's an outdated device that is no longer getting security updates and as such should not be used on the open web.
So even if one typed www.google.com and shared the page, it would be re-wrapped into a digg.com URL
Marketing has taken the lead in corporate websites projects to the detriment of the end-users, AMP puts the user in the center.