It's not your site any more. You're just a free content provider to Google now.
I can make pages faster without AMP by stripping the needless bloat and using a proper CDN. Why do I need this tech again, besides the artificial goad of page rank?
(That being said, I dislike it as a content provider and as someone worried Google has too much power)
Plus who needs to lose even more screen space to that stupid bar at the top plus the fact that the browser chrome doesn't hide itself when you scroll like it does on a normal page?
In the long run, it might be bad for users, as it could result in media producing less valuable content, and one big company having more control over distribution.
But yeah, nothing's free. They give you this great technology, free access to their world-wide CDN, and better organic search results, at the cost of having the X button going back to search.
Though I have no idea how the author things that the "X" button should go back to the home page honestly... You open an article, you close the article. If you want to go to the homepage, you click the top banner with the logo.
He's not suggesting the "X" leads to the home[0] page, but to the actual "deeplink" page (blogpost, etc).
I'm not the author, but here's my idea:
Normal webpage: click result in Google, page loads (for a long time), I click reader view, read some, close reader view, explore the site.
AMP page: allows me to skip the loading time & the click on 'reader view' and start reading directly (so far, so good), but then I close "(AMP) reader view" and want to explore the site. Instead I am back at square one, exactly where Google wants me to be.
Their success becomes ever more tied to Google for the next hit.
And again, definitely not by pressing X. Pressing X means you're done with the article. And if you're interested, you'd press the websites logo at the top to go home, not X.
Yep, and that something was that it was an initiative by Google.
They are not a charity. They would not do this is it didn't benefit them (or inconvenience a competitor, though Google seem to err on the side of the former rather then aggressively going for the latter) in some way. The fact that is offers benefits for others is secondary, or at best has equal footing in their collective mind (many individuals within the company may be more altruistic individually, but the company as a single entity won't be).
You can. In theory. But people don't, as is evident with the web we have today. So Google comes along and tries to force people to do it. AMP wouldn't exist if people would've optimized their webpages on their own.
Then Facebook started to court publishers and suddenly the best way to read a lot of web content was inside of Facebook which is obviously terrible for Google. So Google came up with Amp as a way for publishers to provide the same experience on the web.
That techies like me dont rely on them any more and non techies all share stuff via facebook must be hurting their page and ad hits.
Makes me wonder if this is more a move of desperation on their part. Food for thought even if it is a little too forward thinking.
You're going to have to cite some data for that bold assertion. Lot's of techies outside of your bubble still use (and rely) on Google.
And knowing "how and what" to search is really teasing out of the index the magic combo of jargon, phrases, and synonyms through repeated refinements on your query. That approach works just as well on Google or ddg for me and the bang syntax on ddg for domain specific searches has really sped up some of my searches over what I used to do on Google.
Does anyone still have google search as their home page? And if they do, do they use it?
When was the last time you got past the first page of results? (and btw, its so rare that that people do now did you know if you get past the first couple of pages it checks whether you are a bot).
Im contrasting how it used to be (reading google results making up a good majority of the time online) to how it is now (no more than 1 or 2 pages a day, sometimes not even that in a week)
Google is my home page, I use it so often I don't think about using it. I can't think of one thing I've searched for this morning. But opening my history reveals half a dozen things I've searched for. Most of the time I "knew" my destination but google gets there quickest.
And I'm not sure I ever remember spending a long time reading google results, for me google became my go to precisely because it was so quick I didn't have to spend long just get to the results.
It's true that social media provides a lot of traffic to places around the web but search is still huge.
Thats not extrapolating anything.
Obviously much less experienced techies still need to look up how many sides a square has at least twice a day.
A data point of one isn't particularly descriptive.
I'm pretty sure I'm not.
Kinda guessed as much from the start (hence the - probably to forward thinking conclusion).
But probably worth pointing out. The reason i noticed I hardly used google any more last week, was because I did a search and realised it had been so long since i saw google search results on a desktop i almost forgot what they look like.
And yeah, i know that is because i spend most of my time now on places like hn, closed networks with all the technical manuals you could ever need on hand, specialist forums or tor sites that google doesn't even know exist let alone provide search functionality.
But i am definately not alone. And it definately looks like the future (or at least more like what the internet used to be). Infinately more valuable information. No spam bots or corporate advertising. Just experienced techies sharing knowledge, skills and resources.
But all that is irrelevent to the point that unlike historically techies arent earning google revenue and non techies really dont use google that much.
We went through a time when adsense completely dominated the ad market.
Yet there is another google "dependancy" I havent seen for a very long time.
And that i share with pretty much everyone techy enough to install an ad blocker.
I still go past the first couple pages somewhat regularly and I don't get any sort of CAPTCHA.
for example. just did a search for "trump" on mobile and google search stops offering next after 13 pages.
If you've clicked on clickbait then you are part of that problem, especially if you've clicked on clickbait but not other adverts.
The fact that you even think this makes me wonder if you're even a "techie".
I'm really really curious about how it would be if we had "free" mesh networks under ipfs like content. It wouldn't need to be high capacity, just text, mail, json; enough to communicate.
Citation: The "web" used to be just text and <form>s; we were already there.