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I decided to disable AMP on my site

alexkras.com

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Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#191

Post by TekMol »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #170
TekMol wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever Google wants you to do to access the content. Once it is on their domain, they have full control over it.

It's not on their domain though. Or at least, it's not _only_ on their domain. Google is just caching content served from the publisher's domain; you can access that content just fine without going through Google.

Sure, they don't force you to hand over your data and then delete it :) What a noble gesture.

But the version on Googles domain is the version they display in the search results. So it's the version that is seen by users. So it's the version that matters.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#192

Post by ashark »

josteink wrote: post #84
AznHisoka wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So lets say AMP was not invented. Web pages have been notoriously slow on mobile for a decade. Where is this open standard to make pages lod faster? where is W3 or Mozilla? Its been a decade. if there was a competituve open standard I would be against AMP but there isnt.

> Where is this open standard to make pages lod faster? Not filling a page of what is effectively 80KB static text-content with 20MBs of JS, fonts, tracking-code and other "assets" would be a good start. The web isn't slow. People deliberately create slow web-pages because they care more about user-tracking and "fancy" technology than they care about user-experience. And making Google a pre-requisite for any web-page…

At some point... god, most of a decade ago now, I guess, it seems like the kinds of people doing web design changed and this new crop didn't care about or understand bandwidth constraints like the old ones did. Strangely, this was around the same time "digital native" instead of "print influenced" design got big, so you'd think it'd have gone the other way, but it definitely did not.

In fact, I'd say the much-derided Flash aesthetic/inefficiency kind of won, right around the time we were all celebrating killing Flash. Everything's whiz-bang shiny and so damn slow and resource-hogging. Plus flat design is a disaster in all but the most capable hands, so I'd say UX generally has suffered over the last decade.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#193

Post by epistasis »

vorpalhex wrote: post #172
acdha wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an over-simplification: 1. Users have no control: if you want real URLs or the full experience, you have to work around AMP or stop using Google. 2. It's technically true that publishers can choose whether to use AMP but Google rank is a make-or-break issue for many publishers and that means the decisions is made under the threat of losing out to competitors who use AMP even if your site is already just as fas…

1. Correct, I mean opt-in from the publishers, who seem to be the exclusive people complaining 2. Yes. As a user who really enjoys amp and really hates that every single text-based news source takes over a minute to load on a 100Mb/s+ connection, I feel not bad at all. Not even the tiniest bit. Publishers entirely brought this upon themselves. Internet speeds are faster than they've ever been, and websites are the sl…

I'm a user. I hate AMP as a user. If it didn't have terrible scrolling and weird navigation behavior and hide the information source, then I'd probably like it for the speed. And since I don't mind other walled gardens like the iOS App Store, I probably wouldn't mind AMP. But I hate it so much that I switched search engines, since I couldn't turn AMP off when using Google search.

I sometimes discuss principled reasons for disliking AMP in HN threads, but I'm coming to the realization that it's really just the experience i dislike, and those principles would probably be overridden by UX convenience, if it actually existed. I just think the AMP team has done a really bad job of implementation now.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#194

Post by TeMPOraL »

coldtea wrote: post #190
TeMPOraL wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a different issue altogether. The information is there, it's freely and publicly available (by definition - if it weren't, it wouldn't show in search engines' results) - it's just in the wrong format . I'm increasingly more convinced that the best way to save open, distributed web would be to kill off Internet commerce . Think of it this way: when I'm searching for information, I'm like a fish searching for fo…

> I'm increasingly more convinced that the best way to save open, distributed web would be to kill off Internet commerce. Think of it this way: when I'm searching for information, I'm like a fish searching for food. Look at it this way: people doing internet commerce are also searching for food -- to put it on their table.

And in the process they're trashing the Internet; shitting in their own bed, to be frank, because those same people who put crap on-line also want to use the Web to search for the information they need quickly and efficiently...

(Related, I wonder how many people in adtech actually use ad blockers.)

And in general: people need to earn their living, yes, but that does imply society should support any particular business model.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#195

Post by untog »

sr2 wrote: post #186
chris__butters wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree, while technically AMP is suitable but it creates a walled garden by using Google - who actually boost page rankings if you use it, so they have publishers by the balls "forcing" them to use AMP to get higher in their rankings.

> So they have publishers by the balls "forcing" them to use AMP to get higher in their rankings. Except that I don't write blogposts to please the Google search engine. A site can be found via many other ways. News sites like Reddit are a great way to be discovered, aswell as HN. There's also link dumps like Pinboard which are another way to discover, aswell as others. Twitter, etc

You presumably also don't write blog posts as your primary source of income. A lot of media companies do, and depend very heavily on search engine traffic in order to make money. Between Google and Facebook, their fate is entirely out of their own control.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#196

Post by TeMPOraL »

coldtea wrote: post #188
TeMPOraL wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, assuming it works well, that's kind of exactly what I want as a user. Whenever I'm searching for one of the following (which form a large fraction of my searches): - definition of a word - lyrics of a song - summary of a movie - phone number and/or address of a business - distance between places - unit or currency conversions - weather I have no desire to "click through" to anything. I want my piece of…

> I have no desire to "click through" to anything. I want my piece of information, a raw fact. Do you also want the original content creators to starve and die off and the only competent content source left to be either Google's archive or Google's lacklustre service for the same thing?

As I said many times in discussions about ad-blockers - I think that content that can't exist in a non-ad-supported way can stop existing, we'll all be better off. Almost anything that's valuable on-line is either a marketing expense or done pro bono.

Also, I didn't mean I want a Google-dominated reality. Only said that this particular feature - content in search results - is a step in the right direction; it showcases a better way to use the Web. The reality I want is made of free and open-source tools doing that, not Google.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#197

Post by untog »

endorphone wrote: post #136
hueving wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The carousel is the top result.

The carousel is only for news/trending type searches. The fact that we're all to just pretend like everything people search for is news/trending is exactly the sort of nonsense that makes discussing AMP futile on here.

AMP was designed with news publishers in mind. So we're just arguing in circles if you're saying that AMP isn't a problem because it only affects news searches, when AMP was specifically designed for use by news publishers.

If you aren't a news publisher that's all very well and good for you, but that doesn't mean AMP has a huge effect on how people receive their news, and that it isn't worth talking about that.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#198

Post by dbbk »

coldtea wrote: post #122
madeofpalk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the wrapper has the same scrolling as the rest of the system and pages now.

Yes, but still implemented non-natively -- along with all kind of other bizarro differences that might be lurking.

It is implemented natively. It's just a scrolling div versus a scrolling page. It's not a custom scrolling implementation.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#199

Post by untog »

criddell wrote: post #92
K0nserv wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As pointed out in the article only AMP results get placed in the carousel at the top of the search results. That's definitely an example of boosting AMP. They could generate carousel entries for non-AMP pages with og:title and og:image just fine so there's not a compelling technical reason.

I believe Google uses page load time as one of the ranking factors. If your non-AMP pages load quickly, you will be fine. I don't think they specifically reward AMP.

"I believe"

"I don't think"

Try looking for evidence instead. Do a Google search on mobile. Try to find a single carousel result that isn't an AMP page.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#200

Post by w33ble »

apeace wrote: post #174

> It “traps” users on Google. If user were to click “x” in the screenshot above, they will be taken back to Google search results. A normal redirect would have landed users on actual BBC site, maximizing their chances of staying on that site. Instead, AMP makes it easier for users to return to Google. As a user, this is what I want. I don't care about the BBC's site, I care about what I searched for. If I want to see…

>> If user were to click “x” in the screenshot above, they will be taken back to Google search results.

> As a user, this is what I want.

That's what the back button is for though.

For me, I consider AMP pages a kind of in-between page. I searched on Google, and Google is showing me the AMP page, and not the real website's page. This is apparent by the URL in the address bar.

I expect that clicking the close button will close the AMP page and take me to the real page. It fits the model better, and it solves the problem of not being able to see the actual URL (to share, bookmark, etc). Instead it does something unexpected, it acts like a back button, something I already know how to use.

That broken interaction makes Google's AMP experience super frustrating to me as a user. The side effect is that I don't use Google's search on my phone anymore. I think it's a big reason people complain about it, and want the opt-out option.

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