I was reading some articles on Hacker News about how we’ve lost the internet to big companies and how we are not doing anything about it and it got me thinking about Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) again.
My story with AMP started in early 2016 when I enabled it on this site. It kind of exploded in October 2016 when I realized that Google AMP was caching my content on their server, and wrote a provocatively titled post – Google May Be Stealing Your Mobile Traffic. That post took off on Hacker News, and Google’s AMP team even invited me to have lunch with them to learn more about my concerns.
Two leads of AMP project are very nice people and were really responsive to my feedback. One of my big asks at the time was to give users a way to get to the original link, instead of only being able to see google’s cached version of the URL in the browser’s tab. They already had something like this in the works, but (I believe) my article helped prioritize this feature, adding a button to view the original URL.
AMP took off. Over two billion pages are using AMP, and there are some studies that show that a lot of users really like AMP and the speed up that it provides, and Facebook Instant Articles just announced support for AMP less than a week ago. I believe that this genie is firmly out of the bottle, and I have little hopes of putting it back, even though I still have my concerns with AMP.
What I realized today, however, is that while I don’t so much mind AMP as a publisher, I really hate it as a user. I realized that EVERY TIME I would land on AMP page on my phone, I would click on the button to view the original URL, and would click again on the URL to be taken to the real website.
I don’t know why I do it, but for some reason it just doesn’t feel “right” to me to consume the content through the AMP. It feels slightly off, and I want the real deal even if it takes a few seconds extra to load.
I’ve looked through AMP the open source project issues on Github, and noticed that a similar request was closed with the following comment:
AMP is a JavaScript library. You cannot make an opt out for it, just like you cannot make an opt out for jQuery, except by disabling JavaScript.
While this is technically correct, this is not the REAL point of this request. I have no issue with the AMP library itself. I don’t care that Facebook Instant Articles or Pinterest use AMP. To be honest, I don’t even know what Facebook Instant Articles are.
My issue with AMP being used inside Google the Search engine, that I use very heavily on my mobile phone. My issue is with the fact that I have to add two extra click to my browsing experience on Mobile Google, to get the desired behavior.
I am not asking for Google to get rid of AMP, but it would be VERY NICE if I could disabled it.
I know that I am not alone in this desire, because when I search for “google amp” on Google I get this:
and this:
So please consider making Google AMP optional!
Great post! I was blissfully unaware of this issue with AMP, though I should have been on top of it. Thanks for the info and for speaking up. The only chance we have of slowing the mass content ‘appropriation’ trend is through awareness and public objection.
If you don’t like AMP, why are you publishing to it?
This would be a good post, but tldr just because I don’t like AMP as a user, I can’t assume that all my readers don’t like it. I just wish users that didn’t like it had an option to turn it off.
That, and as a publisher I want to participate in incentives that Google offers for using AMP.
Yes please. I’ve hated AMP from the beginning, and I have some experience in the SEO world. I’m tired of clicking a Reddit post in Google and seeing an out dated AMP version of the post instead of opening the actual post in the Reddit app. I would much rather wait an additional 800ms compared to having to click the link at the top of an AMP to see the original article. I bairly ever notice the original article loading slower unless they have it swamped with ads in which case I hold it against the website for being spammy.
i agree with the extra clicks irritation, and you can’t share from amp either, you have to click back to the original post.
but on my phones, on anything i use, it is ootional. it asks if i want to male the pagemobile friendly, and if not i ignore it and keep reading and the question quickly vanishes.
so what is different for you? im confused.
Can’t you make a direct link to your site’s page auto generated on your article templates?
Why not use a search engine that doesn’t use AMP?
Because all alternatives suck? If you search for “Dolphin emulator” with Bing and DuckDuckGo, you get a fake, outdated page as the first result. Google gets it right.
startpage.com works for me for that search.
(but then, so does duckduckgo)
I agree about duckduckgo, it’s been a while since I last used ot, so my info may be outdated, but it sometimes gives pretty crappy results. I didn’t know bing was even considered an alternative…
Have you tried qwant though ? It generally gives results that are sensibly the same as google.
Since I’ve been using it, I’ve sometimes hat to turn to google for things it couldn’t find, but only to find out google was unable to give any result to these requests either.
AMP should be optional. Cannot deny speed is very important but it is not everything. At theayurveda.org we experimented with AMP and as a user felt it is not what I was really looking for. Finally we disabled it for good.
I couldn’t agree more. For me it’s because I read a lot straight out of the Google Now cards, and wanted to only use a browser that supports a dark mode for the massive battery savings and general speed. I should be able to click on an article and open it with whatever I want. I don’t like being rail roader or forced to do anything and like doing things how I want, which is a large part of why I’m with Android and Google.
Dark themes and such only help with AMOLED screens, I think?
I found a setting that allows your default browser to be called when Google now card links are accessed. Bet you can find it!
I thought I was the only one who clicks on the original link every single time
If Google asks you to go to lunch again, ask them to explain this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14529605
I am pretty sure they will not.
But AMP lead is very responsive on Twitter. You can find him there – @cramforce
I deeply hope AMP goes the way of Wave or Glass quickly.
You got a HN thread.