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How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

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Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#261

Post by wizzwizz4 »

Kiro wrote: post #169
buboard wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from USERS PERSPECTIVE, amp is meh. yes it's faster, does it really matter if you re getting an article in 1 second when you -obviously- plan to spend 2 minutes reading it? i dont know anyone who thinks so, perhaps your USERS do > A strealined conent delivery platform prioritizing UX that the publishers failed to create what you re implying is, Google failed to improve their algorithms to bypass obvious SEOs, so they…

You clearly don't speak for the users in the developing world with bad connections. Speed is anything but irrelevant.

Google AMP mostly just reduces the latency by pre-loading the pages from Google Search results. That has the side-effect of increasing the traffic on networks using Google Search when Google AMP results come up on the Google Search results, which they probably will given that using Google AMP will improve the site's Google Search ranking.

I haven't benchmarked it, so I can't actually speak from anything but wild speculation, but Google AMP might actually be making this problem worse.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#262

Post by amatecha »

tracker1 wrote: post #237
amatecha wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really a bug - I'd say that's a product design choice. I'm surprised the ticket is still open, tbh.

The reason you'd want to select text is to select text... same inside a text field disabled or not as outside a form field. Unless you think they should just disable all text outside an active form field?

I'm not saying I agree with the implementation -- I think the text should indeed be selectable. But it's not what I would call a bug. I looked at the Bugzilla ticket type system and it should be an "enhancement" or "task", not a "defect".

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#263

Post by bproven »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #232
elbrian wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I saw many flaws and bugs. Can you tell us about (or link us to) some of the many bugs you found in Firefox?

firefox still has horrible performance and battery usage on mac.

I keep seeing this, but I don't think it is true today with latest FF. The recent updates they made have made FF on mac speedy and no more battery hungry than chrome. safari still beats all on batt though...

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#265

Post by dbtx »

pduan wrote: post #129
brianzelip wrote: post #23

Here's one great takeaway: > Treat the cause: Third-party requests slow down the web > ... > - Google owns 7 of the top 10 most popular third-party calls > ... > So you can see why there must be some kind of internal struggle at Google. They understand the value of a faster web but they also cannot go after the main cause of the slow web. And this is how technology such as AMP gets invented and makes things worse. It…

I tried DDG for a day on my phone. I follow stocks and will often enter "[ticker] stock" and Google search shows me that nice chart at the top. DDG doesn't have anything like that and forces you to click into a financial website. I had to switch back. If it added that widget, I'd probably make the switch full time.

Funny, you're justifying Google's strategy that e.g. Genius.com complained about: scrape and present the raw data that people want, and they'll be able to avoid another pageload, while the site doesn't get a visitor-- but wasn't that the point of SEO? It's like search engine means something else now.

Along the same lines, the first time I heard a TV commercial for Bing (~10y ago) I had very little idea what it even was but they happily promoted it as a 'decision engine', IIRC.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#266

Post by usrusr »

v7p1Qbt1im wrote: post #203
Enginerrrd wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither does google anymore though. Their search quality has gone hill dramatically in the last 4-5 years. It basically correlates with wikipedia no longer being the first result of most searches; it was largely replaced with commercialized garbage. Getting the highest quality, unbiased information you asked for isn't really their first priority anymore and it shows. I tried DDG when it first came out and found it un…

The reason Google, or search engines in general, seem to be getting worse in the eyes of some users, is not the result of the functioning of the engine necessarily, but rather of the content of the web itself. The whole web is organized and optimized more and more for clicks and watch time. It would only make sense that the results seem to be correspondingly worse.

But somehow, Google, as their last act of "don't be evil", decided to appease SEO people (who were a fiercely vocal crowd shitstorming over every change designed to counter their tricks) rather than ruthlessly pull through with the fight for result quality. If memory serves me right they were actively promoting "acceptable SEO" to lure practitioners away from even more annoying tactics. And then they failed to adapt once three "acceptable" started to ruin result quality. It's anyone's guess (perhaps even to Googlers who were right in the middle of is) wether that happened because of the slow-boil effect, commitment to their appeasing promises or because of plain old corporate complacency.

PS: oh, and in a certain way skewed search results even help Google, it increases ranking mysticism. When one site is consistently high, their competitors cannot know wether that is because of artful SEO or because heavy ad-spending is invisibly tipping the scales. So they will fearfully carry their own advertising budget to the altar of search ranking instead of running ads on a competing network like Facebook. Who knows wether The Algorithm considers ad-spend or not, better not provoke an angry god!

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#267

Post by donohoe »

rpastuszak wrote: post #34
donohoe wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try: https://www.startpage.com/ It uses Google search, but privacy on level of DuckDuckGo.

https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-gro... Are you sure it's still a valid choice (genuine question)? Most of the research around search engines seems polarised, so I'm not sure which sources to trust, even DDG is considered a data mining tool but some.

Nope. I'm not sure at all that it is a valid choice.

This is new news to me.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#268

Post by tejohnso »

idoubtit wrote: post #125
brianzelip wrote: post #23

Here's one great takeaway: > Treat the cause: Third-party requests slow down the web > ... > - Google owns 7 of the top 10 most popular third-party calls > ... > So you can see why there must be some kind of internal struggle at Google. They understand the value of a faster web but they also cannot go after the main cause of the slow web. And this is how technology such as AMP gets invented and makes things worse. It…

> Stop using chrome. Honestly, wtf?! Firefox is awesome. I do not use Chrome, but I don't think Firefox is awesome. While I use FF, partly for moral reasons, my experience is average and I saw many flaws and bugs. I prefer the features of Vivaldi, which is based on Chromium, but does not phone home to Google. > STOP USING google SEARCH! While my default search engine is Duck Duck Go, I don't recommend it to friends a…

Curious about Vivaldi. What does it offer on top of Chromium that you find useful?

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#269

Post by dang »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #118
soyyo wrote: post #30

I worked on amp for a leading newspaper, and everyone who says that amp is about "making the web faster on mobile" is either very naive or doing marketing for google. For publishers, amp is about trying to top the results on google search and capture traffic, it's their only motivation to publish their content using amp, and the only metric they look in order to evaluate the results. Once they have their amp content,…

AMP is fast because it prerenders. That is the main point of AMP, and you seemingly don't understand it after working on it. It amazes me how little developers understand their platforms these days.

Please don't cross into personal attack. Your comment would be fine with just the first sentence, or if it stopped before "you seemingly". There's no need for supercilious disses of "developers" either.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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