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Please Make Google AMP Optional

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Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#251

Post by Spivak »

theWatcher37 wrote: post #199
bsder wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the ads. It's always the ads. The basic stuff loads lightning fast. And then the Javascript ad garbage starts loading. 20 seconds later and 15 domain lookups later, your page finally becomes responsive. So, what is happening is that AMP is removing everything except Google served ads and that makes everything nice and fast.

Maybe the problem is javascript

It's true of client side rendering in general. If you're targeting mobile and get most of your traffic from search results then you should be looking at aggressively lightweight sites.

* Top bar with a damn small company logo and navigation links. Top bar does not follow the user down the page. Your logo isn't that cool and nobody is using your navigation links half way though an article.

* No fancy or dynamic layouts. No scrolling effects. No bars that follow them down the page. No floating buttons. No animations. No 'expandable' content. No hamburger menus (they're lazy design anyway).

* Minimal CSS. Sane font settings focusing on readability. No web fonts. Use the system default sans serif for the article content.

* Email solicitation exists as an in-band static form at the end of the page (or the beginning if you really can't help yourself).

* Use text placeholders for images and use JS to load them at the request of the user. Or more generally, only use JS to reduce the traffic over the wire.

* (If you must) Use a tracking pixel rather than something like GA or Piwik.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#252

Post by deno »

cheeze wrote: post #218
mkawia wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On ff/windows 10 I just get redirected to the non AMP version of pages. How is this breaking the internet?

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?

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#253

Post by boulos »

albedoa wrote: post #171
kartickv wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (!) AM…

Disclosure: I work at Google (but not on search).

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.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#254

Post by lokedhs »

Honest question. How do I see an AMP page? Perhaps my use of a browser is different that most others (I don't use Facebook, for example) but I can only recall seeing an AMP link once or twice.

Do you only see them when doing a Google search?

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#255

Post by cacarr »

Akath19 wrote: post #212
ShellGh0st wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"on mobile" these days is a device with a quad core, 3GB of RAM, and a 1080p + screen. 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.

"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…

"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_.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#256

Post by corobo »

imchillyb wrote: post #176
themodelplumber wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pag…

I'm seeing less and less non-AMP content as time goes on and publishers jump on the hype train.

I am being forced to use AMP because I have no way to tell my search results to link to the real content

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#257

Post by patrickaljord »

andy_ppp wrote: post #242

What really gets me about the AMP Cache (AMP itself is fine by me) is that it doesn't actually make anything faster. If you time the difference in download speed between the real website AMPd page and AMP Cache URL the difference is almost nothing in 99% of cases. And neither page load gives you that magical instant hit you get on Google's SERPs. The speed difference on SERPs is the background downloading and (possib…

> We already have but how about adding http://amp.newswebsite.com/article/etc." />.

The goal of AMP is to improve the experience on mobile, making the client prerender instead of Google would be bad for your mobile device battery.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#258

Post by corobo »

Akath19 wrote: post #212
ShellGh0st wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"on mobile" these days is a device with a quad core, 3GB of RAM, and a 1080p + screen. 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.

"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…

I'm literally sitting in the middle of a field right now using an iPhone with a 4G connection. I don't need AMP, I need a way to turn it off.

Let people enable AMP browsing if they need it.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#259

Post by rvense »

paulcole wrote: post #162
sintaxi wrote: post #21

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.

If a search engine needs a shortcut to use another search engine, how good can it really be?

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.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#260

Post by pjmlp »

ShellGh0st wrote: post #134
niftich wrote: post #54

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 l…

"on mobile" these days is a device with a quad core, 3GB of RAM, and a 1080p + screen. 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.

Boy how I wish any of my mobiles had that feature set, not everyone is willing/able to spend more than a PC on a mobile device.
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