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Google no longer providing original URL in AMP for image search results

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Re: Google no longer providing original URL in AMP for image search results

#461

Post by jeremydw »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #425
wwweston wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does anyone think this is a good idea? A while back on one of the AMP discussions here, someone from Google weighed in. They said the data was clear: users not only accept it, they love AMP. I asked how they knew that, because if it was, say, just tracking how many people tried the 2-3 tap process to get to the original URL compared to how many people just engaged whatever you showed them, then the data might b…

> users not only accept it, they love AMP. As a user, I will absolutely say I love AMP. AMP pages load incredibly fast with much less bullshit. The real problem is that AMP isn't necessary. Google created AMP and is encouraging (nearly forcing it) it in a very hamfisted way because web developers couldn't figure out how to make responsive, fast-loading web pages without a huge company like Google spelling it out for…

Often, it's not the developers that are at fault. Middle managers, cross-functional people, etc. ask developers to cram garbage into otherwise would-be lean pages. Developers often have no authority to push back, and stakeholders often don't fully understand "why" the garbage they're asking developers to insert into pages is detrimental to the user experience.

With AMP, the little badge (the verification), serves as a constraint for developers, but mostly for business stakeholders. The conversation of "I can't do that, because it's simply not compatible with AMP" is way easier than "I can't do that, because it will make the page slow".

Re: Google no longer providing original URL in AMP for image search results

#462

Post by cletus »

Previously I'd considered AMP a storm in a teacup. Now I think it's enough that I'll switch my mobile device to DDG, something I thought I'd never say.

For some reason on my iPhone AMP pages just don't fit on the screen. Maybe it's because I have a large default zoom/font. But this actually makes them unreadable because pinch-to-zoom is almost always disabled. I have a bookmark workaround for that but honestly I don't think it's ever worked.

Only recently did I discover a workaround for this: on Safari you can force touch to bring up a preview of the original site then click on it to bring that up.

If this change breaks that functionality then something has to change. That could be by using a browser to pretend to be a desktop browser or it could be DDG. I'm not sure yet.

Why do I, as a user, not have the ability to opt out of this horrible broken mess?

I'm all for having Web pages that render fast. I really hope for Google's sake that rendering speed alone is what affects ranking and there isn't some boost for AMP directly because that has anticompetitive written all over it. It would be forcing sites to adopt AMP or suffer downranking (to be fair, companies are typically terrible at designing fast-rendering websites).

So if if DDG gets me out of AMP and I can somehow set it so I get Google search results by default (instead of Bing) without using !g on every search then honestly at this point, I'm in.

Re: Google no longer providing original URL in AMP for image search results

#463

Post by chrischattin »

stevens32 wrote: post #170
chrischattin wrote: post #37

I switched all my default search to DuckDuckGo a few months ago because of stuff like this. No regrets here. If you haven't tried it recently, give it a shot. It's gotten tons better in the past few years. Once you get used to it, it's as good as Google search.

DDG has basically equivalent results for most things, but I find that I use !g for programming stuff enough that I've gone back to just using the Google site for those searches. It feels like Google has better results for more recent programming topics.

Most programming searches are just stack overflow, at least for me. So, I just add `!so` to the search in DDG. It's the same as using "site:stackoverflow.com #{what_youre_looking_for}"

Re: Google no longer providing original URL in AMP for image search results

#464

Post by searchableguy »

Kiro wrote: post #442
princevegeta89 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This amp nonsense has long annoyed everyone and I'm puzzled why it's still around. It makes everything harder and confuses deeplinking, sharing, identifying sites and general navigation between pages.

When you say everyone you mean a tiny minority of developers. The actual users don't care or even know what it is. If anything they like it because it loads the page faster.

I don't know if it is just my experience but amp sites load slower than hn does. Slower than my own websites. Slower than the websites I usually read on.

Sure, amp sites from the feed appear to "work" instantly but they fetch all the content in the background so that's not fair (on chrome at least).

Re: Google no longer providing original URL in AMP for image search results

#465

Post by searchableguy »

asjw wrote: post #363
TechBro8615 wrote: post #34

How does anyone think this is a good idea? It should be clear which news site I am reading when I'm reading an article. Otherwise, how do I know which bias to apply? On iOS, the title bar says "google.com" whether I'm reading an article from CNN.com or WashingtonExaminer.com. Of all the anti-competitive actions google has taken around search results, AMP is by far the worst. I hope they get smacked down for it in the…

I wrote an extension to "unamp" the website of a popular Italian newspaper and as soon it reached a thousand users Google banned it and forced Firefox to do the same (shame on you Firefox) So I guess worse is better we are supposed to accept it or else they'll police us into accepting it.

Can you share more details?

Re: Google no longer providing original URL in AMP for image search results

#466

Post by ferzul »

nothis wrote: post #247
ralmidani wrote: post #127

I got a new computer (Mac Mini) last week and, as the ritual usually goes, I opened Safari and was about to type “google.com/chrome”, then stopped myself and went to “getfirefox.com” instead. It’s been a while since I gave FF a serious look, and so far I haven’t felt like I’m missing anything. Next up, I need to change my default search engine to DDG. What’s a good privacy-oriented, web-based email service? I’ve hear…

>What’s a good privacy-oriented, web-based email service? I’ve heard of ProtonMail but haven’t used it. Been Firefox user out of conviction for 10+ years, made the switch to DuckDuckGo as my main search engine with about a year ago, no regrets. But Gmail? It's sticky. I have so much stuff tied to my email account and it just sucks looking for alternatives. I'd even happily pay. The main difficulty is finding a servic…

get your own domain name. then you can move between webmail providers quite simply: just change the mx records and you can shift between most reponsible providers. it incurs a small cost.

i setup a gmail redirect when i switched to fastmail, that was more than a decade ago. it may or may not still be an option.

Re: Google no longer providing original URL in AMP for image search results

#467

Post by Aeolun »

madeofpalk wrote: post #458
monadic2 wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is changing the semantics of fetching a URL to be agnostic how it gets resolved. That’s disturbing and downright deceitful to the end user. Fifteen years ago, if you asked me how google search would look, I would have responded “mostly the same, maybe they’ll have cool features like asking me which meaning of ‘converse’ i wanted: the shoe brand or the logical relation.” Instead, they’ve only subtracted functiona…

I don't think its deceitful - end-to-end, the site you're displaying was loaded somehow from domaina.com and it'll show domaina.com in the address bar.

But it’s not loaded from their servers when I request it. So it shouldn’t show as such in the address bar.

It blows my mind that anyone thinks that’s an acceptable idea.

Re: Google no longer providing original URL in AMP for image search results

#468

Post by clubsoda »

ergothus wrote: post #33
clubsoda wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me about it. Our company moved to it and its been horrible with any third party application or marketing pixel. My boss tried to warn VPs of AMP being a nuclear option. Instead of fixing the website they rather put a bandaid over it.

> Our company moved to it and its been horrible with any third party application or marketing pixel. Isn't that part of the point though? 3rd party marketing and tracking pixels are NOT things that improve the experience or performance for the visitor.

Yes, this is true. But when our company (ecommerce) relies heavily on marketing data it becomes an issue. Third party applications that provide UX and UI are impacted as well.

The main issue here is executives believed the hype that an AMP website would result in higher revenue and that is not the case. The money spent on making our website AMP'd could have been spent fixing the current system.

Re: Google no longer providing original URL in AMP for image search results

#469

Post by efreak »

chris_f wrote: post #167
alesua93 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using DDG as my default search engine for more or less a year now, and tbh I find myself using the !g bang way more often than I'd like. Basically anytime I'm searching for something dev related or anything that's broad enough that without my personal user info it would be hard to return the results I'm looking for. Which is kind of the crux of the issue I believe. For everything that's wrong with Google as…

"YMMV though, maybe I need to step up my searching game to obtain better results using DDG. That's definitely something I should work on." Yeah, I had the same exact feeling a couple of month ago and created this [0]. [0] https://www.runnaroo.com

I just checked this out and did a search. The last result was for amp.reddit.com.

Re: Google no longer providing original URL in AMP for image search results

#470

Post by Andrew_Quentin »

madeofpalk wrote: post #457
lightswitch05 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't agree more that AMP is terrible. I do everything I can to avoid it. Using DuckDuckGo certainly helps, but I will still occasionally stumble on an AMP site. I've created a hosts block list to help me avoid AMP as much as possible. It currently has 3,569 unique domains (works great with a PiHole!). I'm really concerned about Chrome's 'signed exchanges' where they can fake the URL completely. I hope Firefox w…

If you're using DuckDuckGo, presumably a site that doesnt do the "AMP Cache" iFraming that Google Search does, then what are you left with, apart from a website that will almost definitely load faster than the 'original'?

Ah, so that's why Google has added site speed to their ranking factors? Another brick to hit them with then in the anti-trust lawsuits.
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