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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

I can’t believe there is no way to opt out of AMP as the end user. The UX is so terrible. Often times I will search for something and have a Reddit result come back. When I tap the link, I get the AMP page which:

* does not show all comments, often ones I am actually looking for

* does not let me collapse comment sections

* uses the default white background theme which burns my retinas if I am looking at my phone in a dark environment

* shows overlay ads for the Reddit app that cover about 40% of the screen for no goddamn reason

* requires 2-3 separate actions to get to the original page

Yet I cannot find a browser extension or setting to tell AMP to fuck off. Honestly AMP might be what finally gets me to switch search engines after many years of using Google.

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Frankly reddit is the website that has the worst AMP implementation by far.

In contrast, say, Urban Dictionary is undistinguishable from the real thing.

You won't see AMP if you switch search engines.

Using DuckDuckGo with a backup of !g (send search to google), I don't think I've ever hit an AMP page in search results in my life. Maybe because I only use !g for really technical searches.

!s takes you to Startpage, which, if you're trying to avoid Google, gets you where you want to go by proxy.

Just this morning I got pissed off by an AMP page and was considering a search engine switch. Maybe this is my sign.

AMP was what made me abandon Google Search in January 2018 for DuckDuckGo.

Surprising how little I've noticed the change, after using Google Search for over 15 years. I try queries on google.com maybe once or twice a week if I don't find what I'm looking for on DDG. If it's anything media or product related, I feel like I'm on an old, crowded MySpace page. DDG feels more like the old Google.

You convinced me. Switching now. Fuck this noise.

You can even tweak your DuckDuckGo settings (dark theme, etc) and save them in DuckDuckGo using a passphrase of your choice, which you can restore and keep them in sync across those devices.

Bing implements AMP, and there's nothing technically stopping other search engines from adding support.

Also, links in the Twitter app default to AMP as well.

I wouldn't mind AMP as a feature as long as Google let me specify that I don't want it.

Good for most people they use neither of those things then.

Sounds like a criticism of Reddit moreso than AMP.

I pick on Reddit because it has the most glaring issues. But there are others. Certain tech sites like Gizmodo come to mind. So do some news sites. It's especially weird when the result is a page that contains a video, and the video is what I actually want but because of AMP it doesn't load, and it's not immediately apparent what's going on.

AMP is straight up broken technology. Imagine if you subscribed to a print version of the NYT but instead of getting the Sunday edition you got a ransom note looking summary of some of the articles from Clipper Magazine. Would you be OK with that?

I use Firefox, DuckDuckGo and Redirect AMP to HTML https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/amp2html/ everywhere I can, including mobile.

Use something like Searx [1], either self-hosted or hosted by someone or some organisation you trust. You can still get Google search results if you feel the need, either by explicitly asking for them (!go for search, !goi for images, !gon for news, !gos for scholar, !gov for video) or by enabling the Google engines in your config. In the latter case you get Google results mixed up with the other enabled engines. The results are presented as normal links without redirection through the originating search engine.

Searx can be extended so it would be possible to create a plugin which rewrites AMP links into non-AMP equivalents, where available. It can already do things like Open Access DOI rewrite (Avoid paywalls by redirecting to open-access versions of publications when available) so the ground work has been done. I'm currently working on improving (and fixing, where necessary) the image search engines and will probably start on such a plugin if nobody else beats me to it.

[1] https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/

It's not really google's fault Reddit's amp sucks. AMP sucks, IK, I'm working on my company's AMP pages right now and they are a PAIN. But with enough tweaking, they can be gotten right. So I wouldn't blame Google for Reddit's devs.

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