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

Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

theregister.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 489 posts

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#421

Post by cyphunk »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #27

Ive forced myself to use Bing since google introduced AMP. Do I like it better than Google? No, I don't. But! I like not having google become my single source of content more than I dislike the slight drop in quality as a result of using Bing. I like the sites I go to, to have control over their content and being able to easily link to them. I think it's reprehensible for google to push this so relentlessly and beyon…

DuckDuckGo.com instead, for so many reasons. First, privacy aware. Their index is fine. They don't hide their tale and run, hiding behind captcha's and turning their users into slaves, when it comes to confronting bots: https://twitter.com/cyphunk/status/849615910545620992 (vid comparison of using google via tor vs using duckduckgo)

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#422

Post by maverick_iceman »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #230
exergy wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duckduckgo is a lovely idea with abhorrent search results. Like, unusably bad results, at least to the extent that I'm a reasonably tech savvy user. I'm often searching for papers as a grad student, or typing things "close enough" and hoping Google figures it out for me etc. Duckduckgo cannot keep up. I love Bangs, I love the idea, but the search is nigh-useless. That said, I use StartPage, who have a contract I beli…

In my experience, DuckDuckGo just requires a habit shift. You're used to Google knowing everything about you and utilizing that to provide you catered results. Be more specific on DDG and you should be fine.

IF DDG needs everyone to change their habits to be viable then it's DOA.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#423

Post by tyingq »

notatoad wrote: post #360
tyingq wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't yet seen a non Google hosted AMP page in Google's carousel. Does that happen? If not, it's somewhat telling.

No, it does not happen, nor will it ever because that's fundamentally not how AMP caching works. A site doesn't pick an amp cache like they pick a hosting provider, with some sites cached on cloudflare-amp while others are hosted on google-amp. All amp content is on all amp caches. Google search is one AMP client, and it uses google's AMP cache. If, for example, bing wanted to serve AMP pages, they would need to choo…

That's pretty much the point I was making. The wording from Google to publishers doesn't make this clear.

It is the implementation they chose, and it does have speed benefits. But, an edge cache that allows the end user more control, their own domain, an no hijacking header is possible, and would provide a notable speed benefit. If there were a choice between the two, publishers would likely pick the latter.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#424

Post by thr0waway1239 »

I don't like AMP for no other reason than I don't believe there are any genuinely decentralized initiatives anymore.

"Oh, we open source it, you know", seems the common answer.

If an initiative is rolled out from the innards of one of the tech giants, and there are a bunch of other tech giants contributing to the initiative because it is open source, and most of the contributors and maintainers just accidentally happen to be also be employees of the tech giants, then stop and wonder about it for a while. And then reject it. That is, don't participate in the initiative.

Here is why: at the moment, the cost of open sourcing is minuscule for the giants but the benefits are enormous, and surprisingly often leads the entire tech sector down the path of greater oligopoly (Android being an excellent example). Another way to put it is, given none of the tech giants directly compete with each other in their respective core profit centers, open source is becoming a nice little platform (intentional or unintentional) for extending oligopolies.

There is no realistic chance that the open source code can be used by a competitor against the one who proposes the initiative (if you know of a counter-example, I would be happy to hear about it). But, there is every realistic chance that an initiative like AMP could extend a heavy toll on a genuine but small competitor in terms of code compliance (e.g. DuckDuckGo) and put them out of business.

But then, don't we all benefit from the nice byproducts of their technical innovations? In sum total, once you see the reduction in privacy, competition and decentralization of the web, probably not.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#425

Post by JdeBP »

bambax wrote: post #412
lucb1e wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The results for localized stuff, e.g. a local store, are horrible. The results for complicated questions where the query is either not very specific or the page might not have all words, are also really bad. But if you have a good idea of what you're looking for, which is most of the time for me, it works very well. At least it's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5 billion, all of which are miss…

> At least it's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5 billion, all of which are missing one of the three keywords (which it notes in a small, light grey text, which you only notice after the first three results were completely unrelated and you were wondering what went wrong). Yes, that's really bad; it's what killed Altavista and could really be Google's undoing. Still, Google is miles ahead of t…

> Small experiment: searching for "movie old man balloons" on Google and Bing.

Your experiment's results are not repeatable. When I do that here:

* Bing gives me 8 pages about Up (including that spoof site), one about Danny Deckchair, and a page about a magician who re-creates old movies with balloons.

* Google gives me 13 pages about Up (also including that spoof site), a book of best movie scenes on its page for The Third Man, and an article from The Rotarian from 1948.

Of course, some knowledge of how these things work teaches that this is a terrible methodology, given that it does not account for the fact that both Bing and Google tailor their search results to the searcher. One should at the very minimum log out of one's Google and Bing accounts, which you made no mention of doing.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#426

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

kaoD wrote: post #411
szatkus wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need Google account to be profiled by them.

How else can they profile me in a brand new job, in a brand new Windows installation, in Firefox, if I'm not logged in? The organization I work for has a lot of different job types and we're all proxied through the same external IP so they couldn't even profile my job type. I got relevant results in my first day there. I didn't notice a drop in result quality. Google is just that good even if I hate to admit it.

There's still a limited number of job types at your workplace. If you search for "django" odds are none of your non-technical colleagues have been searching for anything other than the Python framework at work.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#427

Post by ninkendo »

ihsw2 wrote: post #341
ninkendo wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because users seeing AMP links as faster will pressure more sites to do it. Keep in mind, AMP pages on google aren't just fast because you're not using bloated javascript, they're fast because: - The JS that is used is CDN cached and shared with all other AMP sites - You're loading the content from the same origin (google.com) so no need to establish a new TLS connection, or look up DNS, etc - Google's servers/networ…

> What choice do sites have? Offer better experiences on their websites and apps, the technology is available but publishers choose to shovel crap in with food and call it beef tenderloin. Now Google is offering something better. What did you expect Google to do when Apple News Format and Facebook Instant Articles are creeping up? Both offer impressive experiences and this isn't even nearly as impossibly mind-bogglin…

If your argument is "other walled gardens are doing it too", it sounds like we have the same understanding of the problem. You just seem to think it's ok and I don't.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#428

Post by bambax »

dTal wrote: post #414
bambax wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least it's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5 billion, all of which are missing one of the three keywords (which it notes in a small, light grey text, which you only notice after the first three results were completely unrelated and you were wondering what went wrong). Yes, that's really bad; it's what killed Altavista and could really be Google's undoing. Still, Google is miles ahead of t…

>crazy religious fanatic site FYI, Landover Baptist Church (which that article is from) is a very old, very well known spoof site.

Oh, thank you, I didn't know that. It seems real enough.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#429

Post by ihsw2 »

ninkendo wrote: post #427
ihsw2 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What choice do sites have? Offer better experiences on their websites and apps, the technology is available but publishers choose to shovel crap in with food and call it beef tenderloin. Now Google is offering something better. What did you expect Google to do when Apple News Format and Facebook Instant Articles are creeping up? Both offer impressive experiences and this isn't even nearly as impossibly mind-bogglin…

If your argument is "other walled gardens are doing it too", it sounds like we have the same understanding of the problem. You just seem to think it's ok and I don't.

My argument is Google took an alternative road here, like they did with SPDY and HTTP/2 development -- they developed an open standard and threw their weight behind it. I don't see how AMP is a walled garden since any and all other search engines are free to implement the standard as well. Content aggregators like HN can cache and serve up AMP pages as well.

The only controversial thing here is this: publishers' content is being cached and re-hosted on a platform outside of their control. This is a non-issue because publishers are opting into this system.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#430

Post by dorfsmay »

exergy wrote: post #70
jwilcoxson wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checkout Duck Duck Go, still not Google-level results, but it's still pretty good, and not Bing.

Duckduckgo is a lovely idea with abhorrent search results. Like, unusably bad results, at least to the extent that I'm a reasonably tech savvy user. I'm often searching for papers as a grad student, or typing things "close enough" and hoping Google figures it out for me etc. Duckduckgo cannot keep up. I love Bangs, I love the idea, but the search is nigh-useless. That said, I use StartPage, who have a contract I beli…

Scary to think that there is only a single website that provides good "something as fundamental as search"!
Post reply on HN