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Comment by sida | Hacker News Reader

I hate AMP as a user. It breaks my browsing experience in strange and sometimes unexpected ways. (like certain scroll features can stop working, sometimes weird features like search in page can also break. Sometimes when you try to highlight some text, it will highlight a whole section. And the solution is always --> click the button to get to the actual page and then it is fine)

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No to mention it’s practically a dark pattern that they push on you. I hate how they’ll send me to AMP links and then the UX to get the original URL I wanted and not some abomination of a google amp URL is terrible and they purposefully make it as subtle as possible that you’re not on the actual domain or site that you wanted.

It feels like a benevolent phishing scheme.

The funny part is that when I tried the latest version on Chrome on Android 11 back in September, whenever I clicked on an AMP link, it would think Google's AMP domain was a phishing site.

Same exact experience.

That's why I find it rich that Google groups this under "page experience signals".

This is the ugly side of market dominance.

Google is entitled to have the opinion that AMP improves page experience.

But without competition, there is no loss of market share to give them the "this sucks" signal.

So the world has to wait for Google to degrade to the point that a new competitor starts to eat their market share.

Bing? DDG?

What does the world have to wait for? The world is who chooses when a competitor starts to eat their market share.

+ Firefox. I live quite happily without Google (with exception of occasional Youtube), thank you very much.

I've tried both. While it works, it simply doesn't match Google's accuracy. So Google will still get away with a lot of things.

In my experience Google is now about as bad as their competition was when they broke through: lots of irrelevant cruft on every single search, and not just spam but completely unrelated pages that doesn't contain a single keyword from my search.

DuckDuckGo isn't fabulous either but it is faster to retry in Google from DDG than the other way around so it is my default search engine now.

I wonder: why is it soooo hard - for both DDG and Google to just respect + or "" or the verbatim option in Googles case?

Because an empty set is far more valuable to me than a rich set of irrelevant results?

(Lately it seems I've been assigned to an experiment that has slightly better results and also shows me the context they think are relevant in the results page. That helps immensely, but of course I have no way to get that to stick :-/ )

PS: If anyone wants a billion dollar idea, recreate Google from before the DoubleClick acquisition: contextual ads, relevant results. Because that spot is empty, and given Moores law, the fact that the original PageRank patent has expired and more it should cost a tenth today vs then. Also Google seems to be collapsing under their own weight so there's less chance they manage to catch up.

PPS: I'd pay 10USD a month and accept contextual ads on top of that to get back something like old Google.

Honestly, I don't think google-like search engines are the way to go anymore. They're being gamed. That's fine for things like Stack Overflow or finding the background of a person. But it's not good for finding a place to eat, a book to read, health advice, a specific game genre, or the best tom yum recipe. Google subsidiearies like YouTube and Google Play do a really poor job at this, and Google isn't much better.

I think what might work better is an unweighted filter. A google style search engine filters out all tom yum recipes below a certain quality or all health sites below a certain credibility level. And then it tosses you a random one. Google tries to make a one size fits all engine, so it's doing very poorly in many of these. But Bing/DDG isn't faring much better. Stack Overflow and wikis are basically just search engine plugins

Maybe Bing and DDG are not different or better enough?

I especially hate it for reddit AMP links, since 100% of the time I have to click on the original link anyway to read the full comments, so it's an extra middle step for no good reason.

Between Amp, Reddit telling you to open their app and expanding comments. It takes three clicks after opening a Reddit link to see all the comments.

A good reddit app like Relay or Apollo is a must have for me.

old.reddit and i.reddit work pretty well on mobile

https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html

My frustrations with AMP (as a user) was originally what pushed me to DuckDuckGo. Now I rarely encounter AMP-versions of sites.

I have been using DDG full time for a month or so now but they really need to work on making their search results more readable. I might use a browser plug-in to customize the styling myself when I get some free time.

IIRC, DDG lets you configure fonts, sites and colors for results, somewhere in the settings. Works well for me, especially in conjunction with their "cloud save" feature.

Yes I wish there was a way to never load amp

I'm using this browser extension to stop AMP: https://addons.mozilla.org/nb-NO/firefox/addon/amp2html/

Here's the same link for English speaking users: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/

Firefox and the Amp to HTML plugin

Also, sites often use automatic AMP generators which break subtly, fail to load or omit images.

AMP makes images a PITA [1], often it's much easier to omit the image than deal with the extra production cost and effort.

[1] https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-img/

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