
How to fight back against Google AMP - ColinWright
https://markosaric.com/google-amp/
======
dang
Big thread from 6 months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21712733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21712733).
The cutoff for dupes is a year or so:

Fear not, however:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322730)
is there to fill your AMP-fighting needs.

------
SamWhited
I disallow my blog from being indexed by Google. While they obviously don't
care, and really all it does it deny me a large percentage of my traffic (it's
a small personal blog, so it doesn't hurt me), if enough people do it or if
even one of my posts gets popular for some reason and people are looking for
it, Googles results suffer. This seems like a good protest. I always encourage
people to put a "No AMP" link at the bottom of their blog or similar, deny
Google in robots.txt, and link it to a post or page that explains why you're
no longer allowing Google (this one is good: [https://uglyduck.ca/dear-google-
im-blocking-you-from-my-webs...](https://uglyduck.ca/dear-google-im-blocking-
you-from-my-website/)).

------
mdoms
I have to disagree with his final suggestion, lazy loading images for a faster
load. In my opinion, unless your page is extremely image heavy, lazy loading
images causes more problems than it solves. It's a janky and annoying user
experience every time I scroll a Medium post and have to wait a few seconds
waiting for a big blurry square to pop into an image. I would much rather that
stuff was loading eagerly and ready for me when I scroll.

Not to mention, knowing about their ecosystem, I shudder to think of the size
of some of these JS libraries performing the lazy loading.

~~~
thesuitonym
I've got to agree. Lazy loading is obnoxious and unnecessary. Browsers already
load images from top to bottom, so unless your site is already extremely slow,
you gain nothing from it. It also makes sites _feel_ slower, since instead of
reading a paragraph, and scrolling down to see an image, you read a paragraph,
scroll down, and find an image loading.

~~~
untog
> Browsers already load images from top to bottom

Is that true? I believe that they kick off the requests to load images from
top to bottom, but I don't think they prioritise bandwidth in such a way that
downloading image #3 will never make downloading image #1 slower.

~~~
hagy
That is my understanding as well and I checked mozilla documentation to
confirm. [0] That link also covers loading="lazy" attribute for <img> tags,
which I've commonly used to defer loading.

[0] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/im...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/img#attr-loading)

------
Kalium
When I read something like this, I come away feeling sad. It's a well-
intentioned essay, written by someone who understands why websites are slow.
It pleads with readers to not make their websites slow and preserve their
sovereignty on their own domains.

I'm not sad about any of that. I'm sad because the author skips right past a
key point: how we got here. Why are websites slow, when there are good reasons
to want to be fast? In my opinion, this isn't some kind of cosmic accident.
It's not because most people building websites don't care or are incompetent.

Slow websites are, to my mind, a symptom. The disease is that there are
economic incentives to do the things that make websites slow. Well-intentioned
software engineers and web developers who like fast, light, clean websites are
often not positioned to win the political battles required to cut unnecessary
elements, third-party scripts, and so on.

Openness and respect for user privacy are wonderful, incredibly appealing
things. I don't think I've ever been able to lean on then to convince other
parts of a company to forego revenue, reach, or measurability. This could
easily be an effect of my limited skills of persuasion.

I hope others have had different experiences.

~~~
Arnt
Me too. So many of those postings seem to read "[something] is a problem with
[list of ill effects] and I wish it would go away, but I have zero interest in
learning about how or why this came to be".

Cf. Chesterton's fence.

------
lostmsu
I just came to despise Google search five minutes ago, when I tried to search
for "SpaceX launch" and it did not give link to the official NASA live
streaming page, even after I added "NASA" search term. NASA's website was not
even on the first page. Mostly various news agencies like New Yorker, WaPo or
NYT.

------
IvyMike
Looks like this was the intended URL: [https://markosaric.com/google-
amp/](https://markosaric.com/google-amp/)

~~~
dheera
Trying to submit [https://markosaric.com/google-
amp/](https://markosaric.com/google-amp/) results in getting redirect to this
page.

Trying to submit [https://markosaric.com/google-
amp/?dummy=234](https://markosaric.com/google-amp/?dummy=234) results in
"Unknown or expired link"

------
TruffleLabs
Define not “How to fight back against Google AMP” :/

------
Twirrim
I think you got the URL wrong there.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
If only someone could find a way to get rid of URLs completely!

