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Please Make Google AMP Optional

alexkras.com

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Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#421

Post by gkya »

amelius wrote: post #122
65827 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mail service are you using now?

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.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#422

Post by untog »

espadrine wrote: post #295
untog wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm yet to see a single page in the carousel at the top of a search page not be an AMP page.

To be precise, it is not explicitly boosted in the rankings. One factor that Google Search takes into account is page load time. 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' go…

> To be precise, it is not explicitly boosted in the rankings. One factor that Google Search takes into account is page load time.

And AMP pages are hosted on a Google CDN. They are very clearly putting their thumb on the scale.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#423

Post by slackingoff2017 »

boulos wrote: post #253
albedoa wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#424

Post by andy_ppp »

mh- wrote: post #418
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…

Prerender support has been (somewhat quietly) removed from Chrome as of M58. https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/6210#issuecomme... https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/prere... https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...

Okay it looks like they are planning to get the origin right eventually by working with browser makers. Good news!

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#425

Post by scottmf »

askafriend wrote: post #389
baxtr wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and changes the native scroll behavior iOS (which is much slower). Google has no respect for the native behavior

The native behavior changed in iOS 11 so that Safari scrolling on any page is just like the accelerated scrolling on AMP. Check out this response from a Google AMP engineer about scrolling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14384938

It's slower for a reason. I'm not sure why they'd switch after a decade simply because Google asked them to.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#426

Post by akras14 »

alenros wrote: post #394

Wrote down this Tampermonkey\Greasemonkey script that would do the job of automatically redirecting you to the original content. can also be obtained from [0] // ==UserScript== // @name Un-AMP // @namespace http://tampermonkey.net/ // @version 0.1 // @description avoids google AMP links and navigates to the original content // @author Alenros // @match https://www.google.co.il/amp/* // @match https://www.google.com/a…

Does it work on mobile?

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#427

Post by kartickv »

boulos wrote: post #253
albedoa wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Don't let the haters demotivate you :)

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#428

Post by eip »

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…

If google wasn't trying to buttsecks you they would allow javascript blockers in Chrome. But they don't.

Just the tip bruh.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#429

Post by seanp2k2 »

mistersquid wrote: post #392
leggomylibro wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is, if you're a news site, your news isn't going to show up on Google's news platforms if it doesn't support AMP. As a customer, I don't like this behavior at all. I do not like AMP, mostly for the small issue that it's very difficult to link to the base page. Minor consistent inconvenience, major feature rage. But I can't imagine what it's like for a web developer. You need to support a whole other platform ju…

One of the comments in Alex Kras's linked page asks "Can’t you make a direct link to your site’s page auto generated on your article templates?" [0] which seems a very reasonable, though perhaps not ideal, solution that doesn't require Google to make AMP optional, something I think Google is very unlikely to do. [0] https://www.alexkras.com/please-make-google-amp-optional/#co...

It's really strange to me that Google just decided to remove the option to not use AMP. I personally hate that part of it the most. It's like someone made the decision to not even fight the take-rate battle. "AB test it? Hah! They'll use it if they want to get to the result!". It seems to be getting them tons of ill will which they could easily fix by just putting a non-amp link on results. Then again, "tons" on HN equates to basically nothing across their whole user base, so I doubt they really care too much, but damn, what an awful idea/decision to take away the choice.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#430

Post by naasking »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #381
naasking wrote: post #210

I'm starting to hate AMP for one simple reason: it breaks the back button on my Android phone. Like, what the hell? Didn't we do this dance over 10 years ago? Do we really have to keep circling the same drain over and over and over again?

Can you say how? Works fine for me: If I'm on Google search results, tap on an AMP article, and then hit back, I'm back on search results. If I'm on an AMP article, and I tap through to the host site, and then hit back, I'm back on the AMP article (and hitting back again takes me to my original search results page). Works exactly as expected for me.

I would if I knew the precise steps. The past few weeks I've been googling all kinds of DIY projects, and I can't count the number of times I'd google something, get an AMP article, hit back once and end up on a previous google search and not the page that linked this article.
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