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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

#271

Post by noirscape »

eyeundersand wrote: post #73
40four wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preach brother preach! I made this move myself many months ago & never looked back. There is basically nothing I miss about dropping chrome/ google search. My web experience is indiscernible using Firefox & DDG. One of the only minor things I've had to adjust to is prefixing searches with my local city & state when I'm searching for things in my hometown (Imagine that! My search engine website isn't tracking my physi…

It might be just me but I don't get why people on here tend to be critical about DDG's usability. I made the switch a year and a half back and I seriously don't miss anything. There are some niche cases where it doesn't work, you can just use the bangs in those cases. The trade-off, like you said, is well worth it. (Upon typing this, I realize I'm just echoing your comment. Either way, leaving this up to provide one…

I tried to switch over to DDG 6 months ago but wound up reverting to Google.

I sometimes end up browsing fora with poor search tools, and that is commonly when I use a search engine (that or if I'm fact checking stuff, but that's a different usecase). Duck Duck Go always ended up failing to get the results whereas Google managed to get the correct results.

I also have had similar negative experiences with DDG for searching stackoverflow. Google isn't ideal, but at least they do always end up getting me what I'm looking for. With DDG I oftentimes get completely unrelated results which just happen to match the keywords I was using.

Finally the image search would always invariably return porn on DuckDuckGo instead of things relating to the query I was looking for.

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

#272

Post by pixl97 »

emodendroket wrote: post #62
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,…

No, I'm well aware that that's what it's "about," just like I'm well aware that the search engine is mainly about advertising. I just don't care what it's about so long as the results are beneficial to me -- which they definitely are. When I see the AMP icon I know the page is going to load much faster

Always question what long term loss you are taking for these short term gains.

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

#273

Post by Enginerrrd »

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.

This fails to consider the conflict of interest. The more 'commercialized' a site is, the more ad revenue they tend to bring in for google, so they have a perverse incentive to bring them traffic.

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

#274

Post by criley2 »

syshum wrote: post #159
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose my feeling is that this is the same kind of reductive reasoning behind the "same thing, both sides" mentality of American politics. Candidate A: Multiple accusations of bribery, frequently posts racist/sexist/Anti-Semitic/Islamophobic memes on his Twitter account, and sponsored multiple pieces of reprehensible legislation during his tenure in office. Candidate B: Refuses to tip more than 10%, ever. One seem…

That is in no way an objective statement on American politics and the comparison of the 2 party system. The idea that American's issues with the Democratic canidates can be compared as "Refused to tip more on 10%", is moronic. It is more like Candidate A: Multiple accusations of bribery, frequently posts racist/sexist/Anti-Semitic/Islamophobic memes on his Twitter account, and sponsored multiple pieces of reprehensib…

Well, if we're doing American politics

Candidate A: A career criminal who has devoted his time in office to mass corruption, stealing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for personal benefit. Not satisfied with creating the most corrupt administration in history, Candidate A began extorting foreign countries to make contributions to him personally, in the form of bribes to assist his campaign or else. When not stealing hundreds of millions of dollars and extorting allies to the benefit of our enemies, he is known for partying with notorious pedophiles like Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrews, and has over 40 credible accounts of sexual abuse or rape.

Candidate B: Believes that taxation, not monetizing debt, is the proper way to budget. Understands that the broken, bankrupting and failing healthcare system needs evidence-based reform to cost less and do more, like in dozens of other nations worldwide. Finally, Candidate B is the only Candidate at all that understands the importance of the Constitution, Rule of Law, and the freedoms of the Bill of Rights, and doesn't require special interests donations to "manage" his views on the subject. And finally, as with every politician from Candidate B's party for two generations straight, they understand how to steward an economy towards great heights not fueled by a wealthy minority getting wealthier, but by the working class getting the money and wealth they deserve.

If you're going to support a lawless, hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars stealing, Constitution-destroying, child rapist, then have the guts to call a spade a spade.

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

#275

Post by deminature »

Probably highly unpopular opinion, but as a user I've never had anything but positive experiences with AMP-enabled sites. They load massively faster than normal sites, especially on poor mobile connections where main sites sometimes hang indefinitely trying to load javascript, ads, etc.

While content publishers are continuing to overload their sites with further trackers, ads, javascript, remotely loading assets which slow down performance, AMP seems like one of the few counterbalances and is pro-user, even if Google's endgame is self-enrichment rather than benevolence.

Content publishers could easily fight back by independently improving their own performance and not forcing mobile users to suck down megabytes of trackers on shaky connections, but they seem to be choosing not to.

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

#276

Post by Enginerrrd »

iudqnolq wrote: post #179
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…

Are you saying Google scrapes Yandex and Bing? If not, your response isn't relavant to my comment. Google may have gotten worse, duckduckgo may have gotten better (I use DDG for most searches, so not sure) but the case for duckduckgo doesn't involve them having a great search team, since they don't have their own index.

Ah, I understand what you were saying now. Your original comment doesn't quite read like that to me so I misinterpreted it.

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

#277

Post by bassman9000 »

mrtksn wrote: post #209
bassman9000 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMP is Youtube for written content. A strealined conent delivery platform prioritizing UX that the publishers failed to create themselves all these years. Do you pay for youtube? Because the vanilla youtube experience is an ad-ridden UX nightmare. If AMP is YouTube, AMP sucks.

I use adblocking on Safari(mobile and desktop), so the web experience for me is very good. On the iPhone App, the ads are annoying but I do understand that this is how the content is paid for, so I am O.K. with it. The main difference is that with many websites things jump around when on Youtube the design is clearly defined. There's no cognitive load in trying to find the content between those "subscribe" popups and…

What's the point of praising youtube's UX if you're blocking part of it?

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

#278

Post by wizzwizz4 »

stephenr wrote: post #193
noelsusman wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course AMP has other motives than simply making the web faster for mobile, but it also does make the web faster for mobile. I guarantee the AMP version of that paper's mobile website provided a significantly better user experience than the normal version. That is why AMP has been successful, and it's why I will continue to click on AMP links whenever available. Is giving Google that much control ideal? Of course n…

Install a content blocker, and the original site sans bullshit is the best experience. Ironically the amp page is artificially slow when blocking amp’s JS because they force an 8 second delay - via required boilerplate css - before content is visible.

Source for your second paragraph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16730905

That's out of date now, though; despite still being part of the required boilerplate CSS for AMP pages, I can't find that delay in any of the https://amp.dev/ pages (the ampbyexample.com replacement demo site).

This is really shady.

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

#279

Post by dbtx »

vanadium wrote: post #155
pduan wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I put in "AAPL stock" and got Apple's ticker. I put in "CGC stock" and got Canopy Growth's. "GOOG stock", got Google's ticker. The actual queries I entered were not wrapped in quotes. So for some stocks, it's actually there. But no charts.

I also got nothing with [0], so I unblocked JavaScript and removed /html from the URL and there's the ticker at [1]. I suppose ia= is for 'inline applet' or something.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=aapl+stock

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=aapl+stock&ia=stock

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

#280

Post by mgalgs »

elbrian wrote: post #126
idoubtit wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

It's definitely slower for me (Linux, recent Intel with 20 cores, 32 GB RAM).

I still use it on principle. But let's not get complacent with regards to performance. That's why Chrome won in the first place.

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