
You can't disable Google AMP - DAddYE
https://productforums.google.com/forum/?nomobile=true#!topic/webmasters/8ogdv04Cm-k
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lovich
Like the other commenters here, I really disliked amp for a variety of reason
such as the bar on top and the inability to easily link the main version of
the page. However, I'be come to feel that we've brought this on ourselves as
Web developers by making every website incredibly bloated and only possible to
use on high speed connections. I've spent the past month in thailand on a much
slower connection and the only sites I can reliably use currently are text
sites like hacker news and amp pages. I can have a site like reddit even take
30-40 seconds to load and more complicated sites like cnn will load part of
the page and then silently fail on me.

AMP is not a great solution, but it is at least _a_ solution, when the
industry was not taking steps to fix the problem themselves

~~~
mbenjaminsmith
What part of Thailand is that? I get around ~50M/s on my phone. I haven't
checked my home cable in a while but I stream HD video (Netflix / YouTube) to
several computers / TVs at once w/o issue.

> The new preconnect API is used heavily to ensure HTTP requests are as fast
> as possible when they are made. With this, a page can be rendered before the
> user explicitly states they’d like to navigate to it; the page might already
> be available by the time the user actually selects it, leading to instant
> loading.

I get the impression AMP boils down to that. Google wants to present publisher
content in "mobile app" form and has decided to push most of the cost onto
publishers. I really wish they would have taken a different approach. They
could have just slapped a stamp of approval on sites with good mobile layout
and sub 1s load times. Let publishers make their own technology decisions
about how to get there.

Also the Google News horizontal scrolling / AMP page scrolling / back button
is a clusterfuck. More often than not I have to reload Google News from the
address bar as an intermediate step in navigation. If you're going to wreck
the web for better user experience then at least deliver better user
experience.

~~~
lovich
I'm near phitsanulok now but had the same experience over the country. It
might be because I'm using a tmobile sim through their partnership with local
providers as I have seen the locals with much better speed in the city
centers. The second you get out of the city and drop down to 3g or whatever
the one below that is called, the locals have the same Web experience I have
had

The stamp of approval for sub n seconds as a benchmark does sound like a
better approach but at this point google is acting like a parent whose told
their children to clean their room, or the parent is going to clean the room
by tossing everything out. I get the impression that Google only cares about
the results when it comes to making the Web faster, and doesn't care about
anyone else's costs at this point

------
Lazare
As a user, I've found AMP results to be invariable an excellent user
experience on mobile. I will always click an AMP link over a non-AMP link,
when on mobile, because I know the AMP link will load quickly and be usable,
and the odds are good the non-AMP link will not.

Apparently this is a minority view around here. :)

~~~
bastawhiz
I completely agree with you. There are so many things that infuriate me about
regular sites:

\- Images not having defined heights, leading to content jumping up as I'm
reading

\- Ads loading and unloading, leading to the page jittering up and down
erratically, making the content unreadable

\- Auto-playing videos: some start playing audio, some have the audio muted
but still pause any music I have playing

\- Those ads that scroll up across the page (which wouldn't be a problem, but
they scroll at a third of the speed that I drag them up at)

\- The "Read Full Story" buttons that animate the content downwards, freezing
everything for a few seconds while the dumb animation plays

\- Web fonts taking an eternity to load, leaving me with no content for ten,
fifteen, or more seconds

\- Web fonts loading unexpectedly and causing all the text to reflow,
destroying my scroll position

There are so many more things.

But here's the thing: there are no ad-blockers for Chrome on Android. I can't
turn this crap off. And overwhelmingly, I can't just pay someone money to make
it stop. I would gladly hand over fifty bucks or more every month to read news
in peace, but there's no centralized way to do that.

AMP, at the very least, gets rid of these problems for me. Top bar and URL
issues aside, clicking an AMP link is infinitely less frustrating than
clicking a non-AMP link.

~~~
QuercusMax
Even more annoying: when the entire article loads, I read the first couple
paragraphs, THEN it hides everything behind the "Read Full Story" link! It's
infuriating!

AMP gives a great user experience on mobile, at least speed-wise. I haven't
had any real complaints as a user. (Disclaimer: I work for a non-Google
Alphabet company.)

~~~
username223
> Disclaimer: I work for a non-Google Alphabet company.

I.e. you work for Google, but not in advertising. The attempted rebranding has
been awfully heavy-handed lately.

~~~
euyyn
I work for Google Cloud and I wouldn't call that advertising nor a "non-Google
Alphabet company". So GP's distinction is useful and yours isn't.

~~~
username223
My bad -- I forgot that Google was also in the shared hosting business. What
is a useful dividing line between "Google" and "Alphabet"?

~~~
QuercusMax
Alphabet is a holding company that trades under GOOG and GOOGL. Alphabet
itself doesn't do a whole lot aside from allocate capital to its subsidiary
companies.

Aside from Google, Alphabet owns Calico, DeepMind, GV (formerly Google
Ventures), CapitalG (formerly Google Capital), X, Google Fiber, Nest Labs,
Jigsaw, Sidewalk Labs, Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences - my company) and
Waymo. These things are all "Not Google".

Google is everything that's owned/done by Google Inc. This includes Search,
Ads, Chrome, Android, Google+, Google Cloud Platform, GSuite
(GMail/Docs/Sheets/Slides/etc), and tons of other stuff.

~~~
username223
Thanks. I would have expected that Google was either profit or surveillance,
while Alphabet (i.e. not-Google) was the rest. It seems more like Google is
"mostly not burning money," while not-Google is the rest.

------
colinbartlett
AMP is absolutely infuriating. I constantly share links via iOS extensions,
for example Slack, and AMP gives me this ridiculous google.com link.

I've thought about building an adblock style blocking mechanism for these
links. But it seems I'd end up blocking an increasingly large percentage of
the search results.

~~~
ninkendo
No joke, it became enough of an issue for me that I ended up switching to
DuckDuckGo on mobile. It's been around 3 months now.

Google really really really needs to fix amp links.

~~~
mort96
I switched to iOS this christmas. One of the first things I did was try to
google something, get infuriated by the crappy AMP user experience, get even
more infuriated there was no way to disable it anywhere, and switch to DDG.

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sheeshkebab
The top bar in google AMP results is super annoying (and hidden url's are
cherry on that, making it difficult to share url's correctly).

That said rendering speed of AMP is quite noticeably faster than navigating to
the actual site - or at least for more popular tech oriented news type sites.

Hard to say what's better - but I say to hell with AMP and just let us see raw
websites.

------
makecheck
This AMP "feature" caused me to switch my entire search engine on mobile. In
other words, you have to disable it by not using Google.

~~~
colinbartlett
Great idea. To which search engine did you switch?

~~~
enzanki_ars
I use DuckDuckGo [1] instead of Google. The search results are nearly
identical and the bangs [2] are very handy.

[1]: [https://duckduckgo.com/](https://duckduckgo.com/)

[2]: [https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)

~~~
jessriedel
For what it's worth, you can get this same functionality in desktop chrome in
slightly fewer keystrokes using the custom search engines. Doesn't work on
mobile, or at a public machine though.

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seanwilson
I can understand how the aspect of the control Google has over AMP isn't ideal
but you can't deny AMP sites are a great user experience on mobile. Pages tend
to load for me in less than 0.5 seconds even on my mobile connection. For
other sites, pages can take 10 to 30 seconds to load, have pop-ups, image
loading causes the page the jump up/down etc.

Making sites with small download sizes and quick rendering is a very involved
process. Google have made a tool and set of guidelines that force developers
to use current best practices in a way you're just not going to get by hoping
all developers everywhere do it themselves. It's also a much easier sell to
management (i.e. "Is our site AMP compatible?") compared to trying to push for
each individual best practice to be followed which can individually only have
a small benefit.

~~~
CaptSpify
The problem that AMP is trying to solve is definitely real. But pushing sites
to add another layer on their system is the wrong way to do it, IMO. Why don't
they just start rewarding systems that load fast, instead of pushing people
into another google system?

~~~
seanwilson
> Why don't they just start rewarding systems that load fast, instead of
> pushing people into another google system?

This system is easy to follow and validate though. Is it AMP compatible or not
AMP compatible?

~~~
CaptSpify
But couldn't they just have a "Here's why we won't rank you higher" check
instead?

~~~
seanwilson
Maybe it's easy for Google to validate it this way? So AMP has a lot of
limitations and if you're AMP compatible Google knows you're meeting certain
base guarantees. If Google have to rate arbitrary sites and advise how to
restrict them maybe it's harder to rate the performance guarantees.

I agree your approach would have a net benefit as well but Google's AMP
approach of making you build your site with performance in mind from the
ground up might be more effective than nudging existing poorly performing
sites towards being more performance minded.

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a012
My SO is a non-tech user and she hates the AMP bar so much that's fixed and
covers significant screen space (on iphone 6) and it reverts to google search
page when she clicks X button because she thought it'll hide that bar.

~~~
snowwrestler
Going by this ticket, it seems it was not supposed to be a fixed element.

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biot
The place to complain about AMP isn't Google... it's the sites that AMP-enable
their content. If enough people tell publishers "I've stopped reading your
site because of AMP" maybe they'll take notice.

~~~
tdkl
The sites who enable AMP are strong-armed/baited by Google, because they rank
AMP sites differently.

This is just the beginning guys. It shows the BS business Google Search has
become. Either comply to Google Internet™ or get lost.

If Google collapsed tomorrow, nothing of value will be lost and I'm awaiting
eagerly for that day to come.

------
beezischillin
As many other people, I've also had my fair share of issues with AMP. On top
of the ethical issues, the thing to finally make me fed up with it was the
fact that I couldn't even load 20% of the search results on my iPhone being
connected to a 1000/300 landline connection via wifi.

Kind of a self-defeating thing that they claim to make the web universally
better and then force everyone to use technology that is clearly broken on so
many search pages and then actively try and prevent you from using the old,
actually working links.

Needless to say, I'm currently using DuckDuckGo on all of my mobile devices
and am considering switching to it on my computers as well. It baffles me that
Google gets away with the things they've been doing recently. I used to be
really happy they exist, now I kinda wish they had tougher competition and
weren't in many de-facto monopolistic positions. Other than the fact that they
barely support anything they offer, be it "free" or paid products, they change
and shut down projects almost monthly.

They are slowly turning Chrome into a walled garden going so far as to remove
your own, manually installed extensions when they don't like what you're
using. They ruined hangouts, which was a really great, even standout VOIP
platform that offered not only the convenience of being browser-based, but all
these plugins that would come in handy while producing content (like volume
adjustments on participants and an export feature, for podcasting or D&D) or
drawing boards or group YouTube video playback. They messed up mobile search
with AMP, in an effort to dominate the web even more. They shut down
Panoramio. They promised to fix Android for years and even 6 years after it
became mainstream, the experience is noticeably less smooth than the
competition, etcetcetc.

Using a Google product is only recommended if you're not planning on investing
into a long-term future it seems.

Unfortunately, however convenient it was to rely on a single platform, for now
I think possible solution is to look for alternatives and show our dislike by
hitting them where it hurts: their install base.

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snowwrestler
To be clear, this is referring to the client side--that is, from the
perspective of mobile web searchers, you can't ask Google to hide AMP results
from the results page.

To my knowledge, publishers still have to opt into participating in Google
AMP, and I assume they can opt out? That was my fear in reading the headline--
that publisher participation in AMP is irrevocable, which would be bad.

~~~
saurik
If you stop doing AMP, won't all of the non-canonical/duplicated/evil
amp.google.com URLs users have now shared and linked to your content going to
break, meaning that once you go AMP you are effectively trapped?

~~~
snowwrestler
Good question. I don't know.

Or maybe, once Google has a hosted copy of an AMP page, it will never remove
it.

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plorkyeran
AMP was the thing that finally got me to stop using Google on my phone. Quite
the accomplishment.

Perhaps AMP would improve my browsing experience if it actually worked, but
I've only ever gotten a blank page when clicking on an AMP link.

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greglindahl
I've always wanted a browser extension, perhaps built on Decentraleyes[1],
which replaces the amp code with code that drops ads and trackers and just
shows text and images. For bonus points you could look at httpseverywhere[2]
and transform the google.com cached urls back to the originals.

Alas, it's rare to find a phone browser that supports extensions.

1:
[https://github.com/Synzvato/decentraleyes](https://github.com/Synzvato/decentraleyes)

2: [https://github.com/EFForg/https-
everywhere](https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere)

------
technion
The thing about AMP is that it takes work. You cannot just install an AMP
plugin and expect your existing website to suddenly serve AMP.

However, with certain CMS's, that's exactly how things are marketed. So what
we're seeing is people go off and buy themes or whatever to make their website
look the way they want, then they install some plugin and say "done". And then
they are taken by surprise when, on mobile, their site either doesn't load at
all, or looks nothing like the "premium theme" they paid for.

FWIW, I'm glad I moved my blog to AMP. I feel like it loads pretty well
instantly on and I feel somewhat future proofed.

Would I encourage a less technical user to go through this? Not really.

Also, I wish Google would work better with integrating their own tooling.
Getting lower scores on Google Pagespeed after enabling AMP because of the AMP
CDN configuration is somewhat absurd.

~~~
detaro
The question then of course is: why is the non-AMP version of your blog
slower, and could you have improved that with the same effort? Or is it just
that people coming there via Google get Googles CDN which is faster?

~~~
ec109685
AMP preloads the content before you click, which your own web site can't
compete with.

~~~
detaro
from Google results, yes. That's only one specific (but for many admittedly
important) situation, and sounds more like "AMP because that's the hoop Google
has you jump through to get preloading", not "AMP because it makes the site
faster".

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lcw
I'm glad they fixed this. It has been driving me insane.

I also wonder in general when they have canonical links set up what the
statistics will look like on interactions with them. I understand what AMP is
trying to achieve with site performances, and its great for some mediums
specifically the simple reading of news, but it's dummying down the internet.
Personally I hope that people get bored of the AMP experience and click to the
more feature rich website experience(that obviously don't have terrible site
performance).

