Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Please Make Google AMP Optional

alexkras.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 457 posts

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#441

Post by WorldMaker »

epistasis wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#442

Post by alenros »

akras14 wrote: post #426
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?

Yes - if you have one of these extensions installed. Tampermonkey even has an application for Android.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#443

Post by ccommsxx »

Dayshine wrote: post #437
ccommsxx wrote: post #352

I've been waiting for a comment on why re-hosting verbatim copies of the original content by google is not considered copyright infringement? How come there seems to be no discussion on this at all?

Because the authors opt-in?

But how? Where is the opt-in? Is including the javascript from ampproject.org considered an opt-in to give gogole a license to republish your copyrighted content?

There is no notice or terms and conditions/license or any kind of other legal agreement that I found on the amp website. [EDIT: actually the code on github is licensed as Apache 2: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml]

So I don't understand how this works legally. You surely don't automatically sign over your copyright to somebody else by including their javascript library in your page?

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#444

Post by JoshMnem »

kartickv wrote: post #427
boulos wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

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.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#445

Post by JoshMnem »

JoshMnem wrote: post #380
boulos wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 dest…

One more comment about it:

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-...

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#446

Post by JoshMnem »

majewsky wrote: post #432
risyasin wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See also: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider...

"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."

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#447

Post by johneke »

Even if people are for/against AMP, I think it does make sense to have AMP optional. For instance Google searches will often show the "Ad"-ified link at the top, but with the regular link somewhere below in the search results. Google could just as easily have the AMP and non AMP links in the search results if they aren't really the evil corp everyone thinks they are :)

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#448

Post by takeda »

hoschicz wrote: post #302
takeda wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 altern…

DDG actually was using Yahoo as a serach provider and now uses Yandex. The ads on DDG are from the Yahoo network. > 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)

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.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#449

Post by dingo_bat »

Mindwipe wrote: post #434
freehunter wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#450

Post by _jtrig »

rbjorklin wrote: post #279
_jtrig wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.
Post reply on HN