You are on a search page, you go on layer deep by clicking. The close button goes back. I don't see what else it should do. Mind you that I do understand that a link to the origin server would be a good improvement (and I've stated that in the post).
I'm not sure what you find disingenuous. AMP are just web pages saying "HEY I A AMP, please use treat me as AMP". You can publish the same bytes minus the "HEY I A AMP" and get the old behavior.
No. Just no. The back button goes back. Period.
The close button closes modal windows overlaying the original page and originating from the same site.
I can already hear you countering "But.. since the content is served from google.com due to caching, this pattern is technically correct".
Which is tantamount to saying "We serve the content. So we can add whatever the heck we want"
Very frigging clever Google. Well done. /s
... or is it?
If I hit the search bar on my Android device, and it opens Google Search in an app interface, is it an app, is it a search engine, or is it both? What about with their new strategy of integrating Google Search more closely into apps? How about then?
The line is so blurry as to be irrelevant. The wording on the responses seem to be on a different side of that philosophical argument, but I'm not sure it is that black and white.
Yes but then you won't get the AMP icon next to your page when it comes up in the search results. Over time users will become conditioned to prefer clicking on AMP enabled links. With the icon you are basically categorizing the search results into "really fast sites" and "regular speed or slow sites", even though it is perfectly possible to achieve the same AMP speeds without using AMP.
Why are you introducing a new and totally unnecessary display element when the back button is built right in to the browser and everyone already knows how it works?
No matter how hard I try, I can't think of any good reason for this banner.
But hey, to the right of that X there sure is a lot of room for placing an adsense ad! What a strange co-incidence.
I can't give you a 100% reason for the X. I know multiple UI versions were tested and this did well.
What an amazing coincidence that this great new tech requires users to remain on google.com "for technical reasons".
We can do it in our native apps, and we do.
I guess I could use AMP but intentionally break my page's validation so it wouldn't be cached, but then I wouldn't get the special flag on SERPs, which effectively penalizes non-AMP sites.