Just came to say I hate amp. If I want to go to a site I want that site not a google cache of it. It’s not a better experience. It just means another click to get to where I was going. Stop the madness Google kill amp.
AMP should be the first stop on the federal government's antitrust investigation. The sheer unfairness of being granted search priority if you hand over your content to Google is the pinnacle of leveraging monopoly power to gain power in another industry.
The 'other industry' part. AMP clearly expands and entrenches their power in parts of the web they are already in, but it's unclear what other or newer industry it is supposedly helping them dominate.
Indeed. They control the content, and the technology: It could become technically impossible to provide new alternatives for ads, privacy, or any other future use case or interaction.
Browsers, mobile operating systems, ad networks, comparison sites, video hosting sites, image search, map services, etc., etc., etc.
All of Google myriad of properties benefit from being able to limit competitors web page size, limit their technology use, restrict advertising and gating them behind your own servers.
Plus on top, Google doesn't have to do any of that shit themselves and can gleefully put themselves at the top of every search (and are doing with an ever expanding array of search terms).
As well as increasing the cost of developing a site to compete with any of Google's myriad properties, by having to support HTML and Google's proprietary AMP, that they're pretending is an open standard but is completely under their control.
>Google doesn't have to do any of that shit themselves and can gleefully put themselves at the top of every search (and are doing with an ever expanding array of search terms).
Why shouldn't a company be able to decide what they feature on their search results and how they rank things? If every result was a Google owned site, so what? Nothing is stopping you from using a different search engine.
Depends on who you mean by "we", people working directly on implementing/supporting AMP? Anti-google crowd? Sure, you're probably right.
But as someone who's just an end user, and not working on frontend development who likes AMP, I don't bother commenting when the opinion is extremely skewed to one side.
I love AMP. The website loads faster, feels a lot snappier, and is overall positive experience for me. That's what I care about. I don't care how it got to that point, I want usable and fast loading website - and AMP gives me that.
Can this be speed and mobile friendliness be implemented without AMP? Yes. Is it implemented without AMP? Very rarely.
Of course there's the argument with google trying to get a tighter grip on web and while that is not a good thing the truth is that I, and huge majority of average consumers, just don't care if it means better results for me.
I highly doubt that you are just the "end user" you claim to be, otherwise you wouldn't be here, having this discussion. But let's assume that you are.
>Of course there's the argument with google trying to get a tighter grip on web and while that is not a good thing the truth is that I, and huge majority of average consumers, just don't care if it means better results for me.
What you are describing is the very common mix of "tragedy of the commons" + "pure utilitarianism". The future would be vastly better if everyone made a small sacrifice now, but each individual action counts for so little that you make the selfish but rational choice of letting others do the small sacrifice.
Maybe your page loads faster now, but this is happening by risking the destruction of the very environment that makes such pages worth reading (independent journalism, freedom from corporate control, etc.). In the long run, it means worse results for you, but your individual sacrifice is unlikely to have any effect. You feel selfish, so you rationalize a story where you are just the "common person" doing what makes sense.
The fact that we have a civilization is proof that there are ways out of this deadlock. For a long time, the answer was religion. We need something for the XXI century to play that role, i.e. making people think not only as individuals but also members of an entire species, ecosystem, etc.
Meanwhile, what you are saying amounts to: "fuck you, I got mine".
Don't forget that they don't even actually load faster, but rather support the illusion of such because Google lazy-loads a few of them in the background while you're reading through the search results. Which honestly has some merits of its own, though it's a kick in the dick for metered data.
>just don't care if it means better results for me.
That's part of the issue though, isn't it? Privacy advocates on here and elsewhere point out frequently that part of the problem is that people don't care enough. There's a similar dynamic in this case.
I've defended it in the past when it used to be faster (combined with pre-loading) than most websites, on mobile. Nowadays, it should be quite easy to optimize a website enough to be faster than the AMP version, but it seems not many websites are even trying…
What websites need to not only regularly preload+prerender other webpages but also webpages outside their trustzone? And when does the performance of half a millisecond matter?
Latency to remote servers isn’t half a millisecond. A click off from google would normally take a second or two to render and be much worse at the p95 page load time.
With AMP, this is cut down to tens of milliseconds.
> A click off from google would normally take a second or two to render
The question isn't what do people normally do. The question is what's possible without Google's help. 200ms click-to-render is not difficult.
Google can get that down to 20ms or whatever with AMP, but for 99.999% of sites, Google's monopoly position is not the thing holding you back from faster loads.
Not in my experience; AMP has no latency benefit. Additionally, this doesn't really answer the question other than "Google needs this". What other websites need to do AMP on their end?
I'm pretty sure there were multiple comments about being able to make an AMP-alternative with regular HTML that's just as fast from the very first AMP-related post on HN. It may even have been the top comment for some of the first posts.
As a mobile web user, I love AMP. Pages load instantly. I can and do click through multiple articles on the same topic before finding one that is the highest quality because the time cost of clicking through is nearly zero.
Google's, Bing's, Baidu's, etc.'s users by and large also love AMP or else they wouldn't spend the money on the infrastructure.
Not sure why anyone would downvote me. In the linked comment this user says that Google isn't nearly agile enough for the AMP team to respond to suggestions - or did I misread what I linked?
"I want that site not a google cache of it" might be true for you, but for me, I don't want the site so much as the article or product listing, and for most users, they don't know that it's a google cache of it.
I think AMP provides the tools for a good UX but many sites don't provide it because they want the user to go to their site, because they mistakenly don't think they can get enough ad revenue or CTAs to get the user to sign up for mailing lists or add a product to a shopping cart on the AMP page. These are supported. So they only show an excerpt of the article on the AMP page and you have to go to the site in order to get it.
I'm just curious, since I see this brought up all the time- what is painful about DDG? The only times I have poor DDG results is for anything that leverages Google maps, such as a local business. Considering even Apple can't touch gMaps I don't find this surprising, but for general search I switched to DDG because the results were better. For example, my last search was "mdd 3754" to find the data sheet for a mosfet. DDG links to the result as the first click, whereas Google serves an ad so large I need to scroll down on mobile to even see a result, and the first 3 results aren't even in English. I'm genuinely asking, what sort of search queries does DDG return painful results for?
Interesting, perhaps my Google results are just exceptionally poor then, as if I don't see a result in the top 3 on Google then it won't be anywhere in the results. FWIW Google doesn't provide a single direct link to the data sheet for the query I posted in the first 3 pages for me. Even if I append "datasheet" to the query, the data sheet is still pushed to page 2. The only way I get the result on page 1 is to search "mdd 3754 mosfet datasheet".
Same applies to the query "c++ hash map", first page of Google is medium posts & unrelated stack overflow questions, DDG serves https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/unordered_map as the first result. I assume Google is serving better results for other people, I just don't know why my results are so poor, possibly its due to adblocking & tracking protection. FWIW these searches were performed on brave Android with 1.1.1.1 DNS.
Edit: the hashmap query is to provide a slightly malformed example, since what I really want is unordered_map. If I already know exactly what I want then Google can serve results, but that kinda defeats the point.
>If I want to go to a site I want that site not a google cache of it.
AMP isn't limited to Google cache. Websites and CDNs (like Bing and Cloudflare) can roll their own AMP and cache it themselves, while still getting the icon in search results.
