I hate AMP. Not even kind of, I mean so much I've started using Bing (DuckDuckGo hasn't been so useful for me).
Beyond the distasteful navigation hijacking, and often broken or buggy page loading... I think Google throwing its weight around to force publishers to use it is an abusive use of power. I also think it's an unnecessary standard since it's nothing more than simple well wittten HTML and CSS.
Yes, we should make less shitty (meaning bloated) web pages that are rendered server side especially for mobile clients-- but that doesn't mean that if we don't we should be second class citizens.
More and more Googles search results are being materially affected by this choice. That is to say, AMP pages with no or little significance to my query are pushed to the top; while, relevant ones are not to be found. I find this primarily true with historical content or localized content where the host/author/org doesn't spend time updating things that aren't broken. Further, the companies prone to adopting AMP are doing as many things as they can simply to generate more traffic (i.e. click bait). So it's a race to the top for advertisers/media companies and a race to the bottom for quality results.
I will resume using google IFF they allow me to permanently opt out of AMP otherwise I will begin the slow arduous migration off all Google services.
Google trying to be the source of content instead of the guide to content will be its downfall from the top. I'm not saying they'll go out of business just that they'll someday be made less relevant from it.
AMP is horrible and I wish European Union or someone would hit hard on google. They are essentially forcing websites to format the sites in exactly the way Google wants, then they steal the content. All these google SEO guidelines inevitable end up helping google becoming even more powerful abusing their almost monopoly in search engine market.
When power is too concentrated in one area, its never a good sign for the common good.
Google has long increased the rankings of sites that load quickly and are optimized for mobile. For good reason.
The speed improvements and mobile friendliness should be the only criteria that the Google ranking engine should use for boosting the SERP rankings of these articles using it, not simply the fact they use AMP. But objectively measuring the quality of these page vs other unoptimized sites - which I hope is currently what Google is doing. That way there is nothing monopolistic about it.
Considering how awful most news sites are JS/ad-wise Google is attempting to solve a problem the publishers themselves created. Sites like Forbes are notorious for loading mb's of ads and they have that ridiculous quotes splash page. It also does away with annoying pop up modals news sites love to use.
So if these sites rankings are getting hurt because of their failure to offer good caching, image optimization, reducing the size of JS assets, etc, etc, to offer a competitive experience with AMP pages then I see nothing wrong with that. The competition will be good for users.
As long as publishers are voluntarily using this because it improves their UX then I'm fine with it.
Ideally in the long run this is just a stop gag until these publishers learn how to optimize their own sites. Then they can move off the platform. I don't see it as a viable permanent solution given the compromises involved and nor should the publishers.
My only complaint is the URLs are prefixed with Google.com making it harder to share direct links. But otherwise the UX improvements are worth the tradeoffs - in the meantime at least. If it's still the default in 2-3 yrs and news sites haven't fixed their sites I might take issue with it.
Edit: I did some testing and it looks like Google puts AMP articles in a carousel at a higher prioritized position vs other news stories. They aren't mixed with other news sites... that's not cool.
I switched my default search engine on my phone from Google to DuckDuckGo because I got sick of the growing number AMP links, which I also don't like for all the same reasons you listed.
They are a bad reminder of the early days of the mobile internet when lots of websites would automatically redirect you to a terrible 'mobile version'. I certainly want better mobile sites, but not in the form of these AMP pages.
It's definitely not perfect but I've found DuckDuckGo to work reasonably well for the kind of quick searches I tend to do from my phone. Plus if it's giving you bad results you can tack on !g to the query and it'll give you the google results instead.
Thanks, I tried some Chromium based browsers on the Play Store, but they all have unreliable or even non working Chrome Sync. I'd go full FF, if scrolling on Android wasn't so jerky compared to Chrome.
I started using it because it get's better results. Google says "oh you searched for something vaguely related two weeks ago? let me show you those results instead of what you're searching for now".
AMP is devastating blow to Publishers because not only does it marks Google's intent to steal away traffic, but also punish publishers for not allowing that to happen.
What choice do you have? Reject traffic from Google? Every time I have been to an AMP-enabled page it's been an awful experience and unwanted. But you don't "search" for something you "Google" it.
It is in essence Google following FB in what they did with Instant Articles. Users start in their ecosystem and they don't see any value in them leaving their ecosystem unless they are going to buy something.
Publishers typically aren't where people go to buy things. In fact, I imagine Google views them as part of COGS in a sense since they are what create display inventory.
So if Google has the leverage to reduce the cost and increase user satisfaction while simultaneously exerting more control on the display ecosystem, it seems like a smart business move to do so.
It does siphon traffic by serving it from google.com, and adding a frame to the top that when clicked will take you back to Google.com. When you swipe left or right, it takes you to other AMP links from different results.
I completely agree. The fact that this cannot be disabled (like preferring a desktop site over a mobile one) is really annoying. Google is meddling too much in the website, they need to back off.
I posted a complaint here a while back and the response I got made me wonder what I was missing. Like I was the only one who didn't appreciate it.
Yeah, I get that it speeds things up. But, do they really have to prevent you from linking out to the publisher's full site? There is no legitimate reason to serve up the publisher's content and force me back to Google. Can't even share the underlying URL. They are essentially hiding sites, but displaying their content. It's a hijack and I'm not sure why publishers approve.
And, on a recent search, the SERP only showed AMP, without the site name. Had to click thru before I even knew which site it was. Don't know if that was a bug or something they are testing.
Reader view in mobile safari solves these things client-side. There are others. It's a rendering decision which should be left to the client vs forcing a decision on users in a way which breaks some configurations for people (since there's no way to disable AMP).
I hate the scrolling on mobile (iOS). I don't know what they tried to do, it feels like a JavaScript smooth scrolling on top of native smooth scrolling.
I believe that for some reason, possibly because of the way the pages are set up with the top bar that shows you the URL of the real page (since the AMP page is hosted on google.com and breaks the normal function of the URL bar), they use an element with CSS `overflow: scroll` to hold the main page content. There's a trick to making those elements have momentum scrolling, but it has different acceleration settings than the normal iOS Safari page scrolling, so it feels slightly off. See: https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/momentum-scrolling-on-io...
Agreed that whatever they do to scrolling is awful. On my phone (android, firefox mobile) I can't use Google News anymore because I can scroll down, but can't scroll back up.
The worst part is that you can't choose to load the non-amp version. On iOS, since AMP links to Reddit are 100% broken, I need to URL hack in mobile safari to remove the AMP bullshit to even load the page.
Christ, I tried to visit https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/webmasters/_O8kJMSDpO... from a Google SERP to link to their forums about this issue, and there's an unavoidable Google login prompt gating it...and I use 2FA. Why in the hell do I need to log in to view a forum thread?
Hopefully the push their product cycle up a year or two and deprecate AMP in the next few months.
I often think if this would make people like you happier:
A spark icon next to the search result that would take you to the AMP page if you want to just read something without navigating to a whole new website and the behavior of clicking to a search result is the same as before ––or vice versa, an icon would still take you to a website.
Beyond the distasteful navigation hijacking, and often broken or buggy page loading... I think Google throwing its weight around to force publishers to use it is an abusive use of power. I also think it's an unnecessary standard since it's nothing more than simple well wittten HTML and CSS.
Yes, we should make less shitty (meaning bloated) web pages that are rendered server side especially for mobile clients-- but that doesn't mean that if we don't we should be second class citizens.
More and more Googles search results are being materially affected by this choice. That is to say, AMP pages with no or little significance to my query are pushed to the top; while, relevant ones are not to be found. I find this primarily true with historical content or localized content where the host/author/org doesn't spend time updating things that aren't broken. Further, the companies prone to adopting AMP are doing as many things as they can simply to generate more traffic (i.e. click bait). So it's a race to the top for advertisers/media companies and a race to the bottom for quality results.
I will resume using google IFF they allow me to permanently opt out of AMP otherwise I will begin the slow arduous migration off all Google services.
Google trying to be the source of content instead of the guide to content will be its downfall from the top. I'm not saying they'll go out of business just that they'll someday be made less relevant from it.