Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed

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.

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.

When power is too concentrated in one area, its never a good sign for the common good.

I find it works well, I don't think there's any abuse of power, and I think it's an entirely necessary standard.

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.

Way too much power.

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.

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.

We have to maintain variations of article templates for our responsive website, AMP, Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News now. Product owners and editors think implementing these things is cheap and easy because of all the marketing but unless you have something like a basic wordpress setup, it's plenty of work to implement and adds a lot of things to maintain and requires developers to remember which subset of HTML AMP uses, what the JSON API for Apple News is like... at least Facebook Instant Articles use rss...

"In the spirit of open source, we're working to help develop updates to the project to address some of publishers' and end users' concerns. Specifically, here are some features we're developing to address concerns that have been expressed about AMP: ... A way for end users who would prefer not to be redirected to the AMP version of content to opt out"

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/

I am worried by the attempts of several huge companies (Google & Facebook, mostly) to get more of the open internet under their control.

As kludgy as that is, I've found it a worthwhile workaround until this is fixed.

This is not the problem. You can easily use i.e. React and some related libs on mobile without slowing down the experience at all. Everything will be fast and responsive, loading times and the mobile site itself (if done right). The problem Google tries to address (and this is a real problem) are the cascaded ad networks on webpages which load hundreds of JS libs once a page is loaded. This is a huge problem and yes, it needs to be solved. Just go to any news site and open Chrome Inspector's Networking tab, then you'll be shocked about the millions of resources still being loaded. AMP is solving this by putting Google as the gatekeeper in front of all this networks. I am ok with this, those ad networks created the problem and I am fine if they now need to deal with Google's monopoly but I am not fine with being restricted in using JS in general because you can do it right, even on mobile.

This is _not_ a solution and google should not be doing anything with this.

No other site has gotten away with this. The last time I can recall someone attempting something similar was Digg (remember them?) with the "Digg bar" which added a toolbar linking back to Digg for all of the internet, and well, what happened to them?

Now, I'm visiting https://news.google.com/news/amp?caurl=htt%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcne.... in order to get content from NBC News, while http://www.nbcnews.com works just fine. The writers of the article I'm reading are (ostensibly) hired by NBC news, not news.google.com, and there's no way to get to the same article on www.nbcnews.com unless I do something really awkward, like go back to Google and hunt and peck (I'm on my mobile phone, remember?) to type in "site:www.nbcnews.com article name".

I have hate for the UI of AMP itself (they broke scrolling down to get to the URL bar somehow), but that's also a distraction from the fundamental contract that AMP breaks.

Google would (rightly) get pissed if I made my own search page which "rebranded" Google search results to have my advertisement and then present the Google search results as coming from me; I hate them for doing the same thing to news publishers.

Google's AMP policy has been aggressive and heavy-handed. You can appreciate the technology and Google's desire to make the web faster and disagree with how they are implementing it.

Instead, they created a way to hijack the mobile web and become the de facto content presenter for any publisher who doesn't want to be punished by Google.

Edit: In a way, AMP feels like a scheme by Google to force content providers to enforce the solution to a problem that Google created. They're trying to speed up the web with their right hand while slowing it down with their left.

This is the same logic behind monopolies being bad. Nobody thought AT&T was bad for providing phone service to everyone in America; that was unquestionably great. What was bad was the way that nobody else could provide potentially-better phone services. Nobody thought Microsoft was bad for giving people a web browser in the IE 4 days; what was bad was abusing their OS monopoly to gain a web browser monopoly, because IE 5 and 6 started implementing MS-specific technology.

There are lots of ways to implement the benefits of AMP without the vendor lock-in Google is pushing. It's certainly technically much easier for Google to implement it in the way they're currently doing so, but that's a short-term and short-sighted gain.

Fuck Google and their eagerness to govern the World Wide Web.

Instead, google built an entirely new presentation method itself. This engineering effort can not be ignored and it was not on accident that this happened. They are quite literally stealing the traffic of users who implement AMP.

After 5 minutes of diverting from my main task and try to debug what is wrong with this, I gave up and just removed the AMP URL prefix to head for the actual Reddit website (not sure how a non-poweruser would figure this out). There was simply no other way to reach the information I needed from the Google Results page which did not let me leave the AMP page.

Either Reddit was broken at the moment or something with AMP or something with my mobile client. But the web is supposed to "just work" and Google is seemingly breaking that with AMP. I am certain it helps some people reach to content easier with less data costs but if only it "just worked".

Then it's harder for google to make _more_ money out of you. It's all about growth, and since they won search, they are desperately trying to grasp something.

I wish they'd just push to solve the actual problem, instead of using this as a chance to push people into their system. The issue they are trying to solve is absolutely real, but adding more layers and complexity to prevent layers and complexity is the opposite approach that they should be taking.

Google is thus trying to keep people in their "feed" and reduce the cost of their ad inventory by (in theory) reducing publisher payouts over time as a result of this leverage.

It really is only about getting yet another way to collect data on users and push ads down their throats.

One look at the source code for most popular sites shows this isn't true – and that makes sense because when you look at the average sluggish site the bloat is mostly JavaScript rather than the HTML source.

What's actually happening is that a bunch of people are working hard on something which is important to them but not the user: advertising and analytics, followed by “social” sharing. Since those numbers are associated with revenue, they're directly seen as important whereas concerns about page-weight are more subtle and often an inadequate check on bloat until it gets really bad.

Yes, I think the ease of publishing has led to a lot of people publishing who don't know what they're doing. I have an issue with our "webmaster" inserting full-resolution >4mb photos into our site pages to display at 200x400 boxes. I've told them several times that they need to keep image sizes down, but the person is never consistent. I wish I could disable caching on that user's PC so they could see how horrible our initial page loads are.

I try not to browse our website because I want to fix the bad pieces and it's futile because what I improve is eventually undone when new content is rotated in. I'm just the systems guy, and our website is run by marketing.

The mobile Internet has become a far more frustrating place for me since Google introduced AMP. I just want to be able to turn it off.

Google is presuming to know what I want and it is irritating.

This way, google "saves" those sites by essentially stealing content, since from now on, visitors won't even hit your site.

What's really annoying is that your problem could be solved without causing all of mine.

He's the thing: I CAN'T OPT OUT. If I don't like it or don't want it my only option is to ditch Google.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/