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Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#411

Post by kaoD »

szatkus wrote: post #409
kaoD wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. I'm not logged in to my Google account at my day job and I still got relevant search results when I arrived. DDG wouldn't after months of use at home.

You don't need Google account to be profiled by them.

How else can they profile me in a brand new job, in a brand new Windows installation, in Firefox, if I'm not logged in? The organization I work for has a lot of different job types and we're all proxied through the same external IP so they couldn't even profile my job type.

I got relevant results in my first day there. I didn't notice a drop in result quality.

Google is just that good even if I hate to admit it.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#412

Post by bambax »

lucb1e wrote: post #156
exergy wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duckduckgo is a lovely idea with abhorrent search results. Like, unusably bad results, at least to the extent that I'm a reasonably tech savvy user. I'm often searching for papers as a grad student, or typing things "close enough" and hoping Google figures it out for me etc. Duckduckgo cannot keep up. I love Bangs, I love the idea, but the search is nigh-useless. That said, I use StartPage, who have a contract I beli…

The results for localized stuff, e.g. a local store, are horrible. The results for complicated questions where the query is either not very specific or the page might not have all words, are also really bad. But if you have a good idea of what you're looking for, which is most of the time for me, it works very well. At least it's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5 billion, all of which are miss…

> At least it's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5 billion, all of which are missing one of the three keywords (which it notes in a small, light grey text, which you only notice after the first three results were completely unrelated and you were wondering what went wrong).

Yes, that's really bad; it's what killed Altavista and could really be Google's undoing.

Still, Google is miles ahead of the competition.

Small experiment: searching for "movie old man balloons" on Google and Bing.

On Bing there is a first line of 4 videos, none of them related to the movie "Up" in any way. The second link is to Up on Imdb (good). The 3rd link is to a crazy religious fanatic site page titled "Disney PIXAR's, 'Up' - The Sugarcoating of Pedophilia!" (WTF??!? - but at least related to the movie). The 4th link is again to a youtube video with no connection to the movie.

On Google, the first 8 links are to the movie. There is a line of images, all from the movie / movie poster. There's a list of 4 questions "People also ask" that shows questions about the movie ("How many balloons would it take to lift a house?"). To be fair, the crazy Baptist site does show up on Google too (God has good SEO!), but way down below the fold.

Anyway, my point is, when answering the question, Google is certain you're looking for information about Up, and tries to give it to you.

Bing seems to have doubts and tries to guess if maybe you're looking for a funny video of a man in the subway wearing a balloon hat (??!? it's not a "movie"!!) or the hit song "99 Luftballons" from 1983 (not a "movie" either!)

Bing tries hard, but is obviously more than a little clueless.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#413

Post by smagch »

I want Apple News and Instant Article to join in AMP so that media developers could reduce the cost of news distribution following the single standard. I even want crawling services, Feedly or Pocket, to serve AMP with advertisements so that I could support writers, journalists and media companies; besides, I have no idea if web feed, RSS or Atom, could consume AMP.

Google, which would gain the most benefit from AMP, deserves criticism for potential abuse of their power. Online media, which serve pages with poor performance, deserve criticism for its reluctance to improve their poor UX. AMP, however, hardly deserves criticism, through a perspective of user experience and news distribution.

AMP may look intimidating to the open web philosophy, be tepid approach from a technological point of view. But we need more experiment as it stands: everyone can become a media with the Web, old media is still playing a valuable role in society, online media lack prospects for the future to be profitable enough to invest in journalism. Fighting for the open web is good, but fighting for it without caring about anyone but technological principle is no good.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#414

Post by dTal »

bambax wrote: post #412
lucb1e wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The results for localized stuff, e.g. a local store, are horrible. The results for complicated questions where the query is either not very specific or the page might not have all words, are also really bad. But if you have a good idea of what you're looking for, which is most of the time for me, it works very well. At least it's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5 billion, all of which are miss…

> At least it's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5 billion, all of which are missing one of the three keywords (which it notes in a small, light grey text, which you only notice after the first three results were completely unrelated and you were wondering what went wrong). Yes, that's really bad; it's what killed Altavista and could really be Google's undoing. Still, Google is miles ahead of t…

>crazy religious fanatic site

FYI, Landover Baptist Church (which that article is from) is a very old, very well known spoof site.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#415

Post by fastball »

snakeanus wrote: post #354
Buge wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do ad blockers really solve the problems that this article criticizes AMP for? You've closed one bag of worms and opened another one. How can independent publishers live in an all adblock world? State publishers like criticized in the article might survive. You're again centralizing journalism, this time into the few organizations that can get their readers to pay a subscription.

I think that the ones that will best survive in an ad-blocking world would be hobbyist journalists and bloggers. That does not seem to be that bad to be quite frank as it would probably lead to higher quality content, less copy-paste and less clickbaits.

What the heck is a hobbyist journalist?

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#416

Post by fastball »

MBCook wrote: post #302
bla2 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like Apple's underinvestment in mobile Safari makes it currently impossible to implement this well in web pages in iOS, and that the AMP team is working with Apple to fix their broken platform. I don't see how this isn't Apple's bug.

Under investment? I'm not sure it was a bug, it sounds like it was a design decision. Maybe not in GOOD one, but I doubt it was a true bug.

Why? What reason do you have for this belief of yours?

Apple's response indicates it was a bug, and nowhere has Apple said "this is a design decision we are now changing".

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#417

Post by fastball »

raldi wrote: post #331
cramforce wrote: post #165

With respect to scrolling: We (AMP team) filed a bug with Apple about that (we didn't implement scrolling ourselves, just use a div with overflow). We asked to make the scroll inertia for that case the same as the normal scrolling. Apple's response was (surprisingly) to make the default scrolling like the overflow scrolling. So, with the next Safari release all pages will scroll like AMP pages. Hope Gruber is happy t…

Please don't "fix" the "bug" that disables the "scroll to the top of the page when the user accidentally taps the top of the screen" behavior. I loathe this behavior, have never summoned it intentionally, and can't imagine why anyone would ever want it.

I actually loved that feature on iOS. I have an Android now and miss it in Chrome.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#418

Post by creepydata »

bambax wrote: post #410
squarefoot wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG "worse" search results are also a product of you not being profiled. Or to put it in another way, Google better search results are also a product of all your habits being gathered and analyzed. Sadly we can't have a search engine that knows nothing about us and guesses at the same time what we are looking for. DDG can give better results, but this require being more specific when searching.

I'm not sure this is true. Google results are still amazing when used at a friends' or a public computer and not logged in, etc. (not to mention incognito mode, which you could argue still profiles you through your ip). Other search engines feel like a noob salesperson who needs to be told 5 times in 5 different ways what you need -- and it's really simple stuff too. I like experienced salespeople.

Google results get "better" (depending on your definition of better) as you go in very specific ways. When I browse I clear cookies every time a tab is closed and I never log into Google just for searching. I've noticed at work I'll be googling for programing stuff and if my session gets "stale" (been doing a bunch of searches without closing the tab) I notice Google starts making assumptions about what I want. For example, if I Google a generic programming term say "string," on a stale session Google will assume the string I want is programming rather than, say, crafting or physics, and the string I want is the language I've been Googling in my last few search terms. So if I googled "string" in a fresh session I get a couple generic Wikipedia pages and some references from various programming language. If I Google "string" in a stale session Google "knows" I'm looking for the Java string so they will show me Java string results. If I wanted those same results I'd have to Google "Java string." It does make you lazy at searching though because you start thinking "Google knows what I'm talking about."

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#419

Post by sangnoir »

fastball wrote: post #415
snakeanus wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the ones that will best survive in an ad-blocking world would be hobbyist journalists and bloggers. That does not seem to be that bad to be quite frank as it would probably lead to higher quality content, less copy-paste and less clickbaits.

What the heck is a hobbyist journalist?

> What the heck is a hobbyist journalist?

Shills and Kool-aid-drinking zealots mostly - they are the ones usually motivated enough to do 'journalism' for free. Don't expect any professionalism, depth or any form of investigative journalismbeyond tweet-storms.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#420

Post by cbhl »

Google, Facebook, and Apple all have walled gardens for reading the news on mobile.

The web as we know it was killed when you couldn't link to a news site because it'd serve ad interstitials (Forbes) or full screen pop-over ads (basically everyone).

I think the real problem is journalists rely on advertising income to do their job. That model requires them to rely on Apple/Facebook/Google for their livelihood, and to focus on sensationalist headlines and quantity over quality (to get ad impressions). One of the most shocking things for me was seeing Buzzfeed have some of the better written pieces in the last year -- all of those stupid "10 best/worst/funniest" type lists provided the ad revenue to do actual journalism that other publications didn't have the budget to do. But it's not clear to me how to break this dependency; for example, UBI might come with strings preventing the publication of pieces critical of the government.

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