Google no longer providing original URL in AMP for image search results | Hacker News Reader

Google no longer providing original URL in AMP for image search results

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1,375 pointszenexer542 comments

How does anyone think this is a good idea? It should be clear which news site I am reading when I'm reading an article. Otherwise, how do I know which bias to apply? On iOS, the title bar says "google.com" whether I'm reading an article from CNN.com or WashingtonExaminer.com.

Of all the anti-competitive actions google has taken around search results, AMP is by far the worst. I hope they get smacked down for it in the upcoming anti-trust lawsuit. And kudos to Apple for refusing to change the URL bar like Google does on Android.

I couldn't agree more that AMP is terrible. I do everything I can to avoid it. Using DuckDuckGo certainly helps, but I will still occasionally stumble on an AMP site. I've created a hosts block list to help me avoid AMP as much as possible. It currently has 3,569 unique domains (works great with a PiHole!). I'm really concerned about Chrome's 'signed exchanges' where they can fake the URL completely. I hope Firefox will never support it.

https://www.github.developerdan.com/hosts/

Even better than blocking AMP is just redirecting to the proper page[0].

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/

Yes, that is even better! Unfortunately it doesn’t work on iOS, or I would have never created my list. Literally the only thing I miss about Android was being able to use browser extensions like uBlock Origin with Firefox on Android. Safari has its built-in content filters but it’s not the same.

Why not redrect to the blazing fast AMP page in the original domain (without the Google CDN), instead of often bloated full HTML page? E.g. https://example-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/example.com/amp_d... => https://example.com/amp_document.html

Just wanted to say thanks for maintaining your block lists! I use a few with NextDNS. I try to be privacy conscious but I don’t really have the technical background to know the best way to make that happen so I very much appreciate that you share your work and make it easy for those of us who aren’t experts. I’ve never been quite sure that I’ve configured things right but your NOT BLOCKING image doesn’t show up for me so that’s quite a relief!

> I'm really concerned about Chrome's 'signed exchanges' where they can fake the URL completely.

They're not faking the URL; a signed exchange contains data that can only have come from the original site. It's a secure way of handling caching/CDNs/etc, and it'll be a net improvement for security that allows sites to put less trust in third-party servers and scripts.

We don't need any other website except Google /fear

Google scraped and stole all the traffic for covid19 since 3 months just like it did for other topics

Duck duck go is a lighthouse in the storm. We are all saved. If Jesus came back ask yourself this, ‘would he be google or duck duck go’

Exactly. Search your hearts and use the net with your values as though they’ve become a force to be feared by the swill that is invading our liberties (google).

If you're using DuckDuckGo, presumably a site that doesnt do the "AMP Cache" iFraming that Google Search does, then what are you left with, apart from a website that will almost definitely load faster than the 'original'?

> How does anyone think this is a good idea?

A while back on one of the AMP discussions here, someone from Google weighed in. They said the data was clear: users not only accept it, they love AMP.

I asked how they knew that, because if it was, say, just tracking how many people tried the 2-3 tap process to get to the original URL compared to how many people just engaged whatever you showed them, then the data might be showing you something else (and in fact, I wasn't clear how you'd get from accept to love in any other way than a focus group or survey).

No response. Not clear if that's because revealing data would run afoul of internal confidential disclosure, or because this basically hadn't been thought through.

> Apple for refusing to change the URL bar like Google does on Android.

Apple has its own problems with the URL bar -- they keep the domain but drop the rest of the URL. Not as bad as replacing the domain, but not great.

> users not only accept it, they love AMP.

As a user, I will absolutely say I love AMP. AMP pages load incredibly fast with much less bullshit.

The real problem is that AMP isn't necessary. Google created AMP and is encouraging (nearly forcing it) it in a very hamfisted way because web developers couldn't figure out how to make responsive, fast-loading web pages without a huge company like Google spelling it out for them with a framework.

Now, obviously to power users like the typical HN user, AMP is evil because it's just Google taking over more of the web.

But understand that to your typical mobile user, AMP is a godsend because of how fast it is. They don't care that the URL shows Google instead of whatever page they think they're on.

I am also a user who loves AMP, the same way I loved RSS. The reason I love AMP is one of the same reasons I loved RSS. RSS aggregators allowed instant loading of content across multiple sites. AMP enables the same thing but with a richer experience. It doesn't simply spell out how to make web pages fast. It makes them instant, which is impossible without something like AMP or RSS that allows safe prerendering with publisher opt in.

Often, it's not the developers that are at fault. Middle managers, cross-functional people, etc. ask developers to cram garbage into otherwise would-be lean pages. Developers often have no authority to push back, and stakeholders often don't fully understand "why" the garbage they're asking developers to insert into pages is detrimental to the user experience.

With AMP, the little badge (the verification), serves as a constraint for developers, but mostly for business stakeholders. The conversation of "I can't do that, because it's simply not compatible with AMP" is way easier than "I can't do that, because it will make the page slow".

Companies with shitty UI often make unfounded claims that "users prefer it." Adobe is another prime offender here.

If anyone's word should NOT be taken as gospel for UI or branding, it's Google's.

Reminds me of the Office 2013 ribbon bar - users preferred it apparently! They couldn't find any of the options they'd used for 20+ years but somehow preferred it!

Thank goodness menus for Office still existed on the Mac.

Adobe users do prefer the UI to GIMP, for example.

> Apple has its own problems with the URL bar -- they keep the domain but drop the rest of the URL. Not as bad as replacing the domain, but not great.

You can view the full URL in safari for iOS by tapping the URL bar. In Safari for Mac, you can modify your preferences to always show the full URL. Definitely not ideal, but also not anticompetitive in the same vein as AMP

>Of all the anti-competitive actions google has taken around search results, AMP is by far the worst. I hope they get smacked down for it in the upcoming anti-trust lawsuit.

This reminds me of the EU Internet Explorer lawsuit, which was peanuts compared to what Google is doing right now. Between Google Search, Chrome, Android, Youtube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, AMP and likely 5 more things I forgot, they've stealth-grabbed so much of the internet, it's not even funny. At least force them to split off their ad/datahoarding businesses.

Their ad business is more or less their only business. Everything else is paid for by that.

which is why it should be segregated from the products people find useful

> How does anyone think this is a good idea?

They don't.

> Just heard from the Image Search team that this is an oversight and they'll add the feature! Sorry about that and thanks for the report!

https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/1265688067706245120

So how long until AMP is exploited in a wide range phishing campaign? I know that it is getting harder and harder to distinguish phishing emails from non-phishing emails, but this move is not helping at all. It clearly helps google though.

The annoying thing is, average user will not notice and/or care.

All it would require is an AMP website that mimics the Google login page. It already says "google.com" at the top of the browser, and we've told users to trust that, so...

I’m surprised this is not widespread yet. Is there anything in AMP to detect and block phishing attempts?

The google.com domain would also probably trigger autofill recommendations from some password managers, which would make things even more convincing and seamless.

Maybe they are trying to push their signed exchanges / "AMP real URL"[1]? Last I understood, Firefox says they won't support it, ever. Apple is less vocal about it, but doesn't appear to be working it.

[1] https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/04/instant-loading-am...

> Firefox says they won't support it, ever.

That's a bit of an exaggeration. Mozilla's position statement on web packaging[1] says:

> As a whole, and for origin substitution in particular, until more information is available on the effect on the web ecosystem, Mozilla concludes that it would not be good for the web to deploy web packaging.

Personally I'd like to see web packaging adopted without the origin substitution capability (at least to start with), as it would still allow sites to offer web apps comprised of a fixed bundle of code (signed with an offline key), rather than potentially different code each time you visited. That would reduce some of the concerns around serving "secure" apps on the web, as long as browsers had a way of preventing the server from silently updating the web package (perhaps using short-lived unique subdomains/certs).

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ha00dSGKmjoEh2mRiG8FIA5s...

> I hope they get smacked down for it in the upcoming anti-trust lawsuit.

People have been saying this for years, and it never happens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google - Things take time, but Google did get fined in the past and there's a good chance they get fined again (and forced to change things).

Fined ≠ "smacked." To Google, EU fines are just a cost of doing business. Like FedEx eating parking tickets.

Until Google is fined to a degree that it impacts its share price, nothing will change.

My concern is they lose the ability to counterbalance the other four of the Big Five, if they are uniquely targeted by an anti-trust lawsuit.

Which is to say, I don't disagree with the momentum toward anti-trust measures being brought against Google, but I want them systematically brought against the entire Big Five, or else the effects may just be further consolidation.

This amp nonsense has long annoyed everyone and I'm puzzled why it's still around.

It makes everything harder and confuses deeplinking, sharing, identifying sites and general navigation between pages.

When you say everyone you mean a tiny minority of developers. The actual users don't care or even know what it is. If anything they like it because it loads the page faster.

I don't know if it is just my experience but amp sites load slower than hn does. Slower than my own websites. Slower than the websites I usually read on.

Sure, amp sites from the feed appear to "work" instantly but they fetch all the content in the background so that's not fair (on chrome at least).

I disagree that amp doesn't bother normal users. It is easily noticeable when you click on a search result and go to a page that says amp.google.com?blah=blahhhh and all that. When, as a normal user, you try to copy that link, you'll end up finding this junk and no straightforward way to see the original link. When you click on a link on the AMP page, it forces a full browser refresh. Sites which force people to use apps don't even work with AMP, because these links confuse the deep linking big time. I haven't even seen AMP pages to be any faster than the actual website itself.

>I hope they get smacked down for it in the upcoming anti-trust lawsuit.

I wonder if the outcome of the lawsuit will be a grab bag of concessions, such as abandoning AMP, and, say, adding the ability to fully delete Google Apps from Android rather than doing a mere factory reset, making opt-out of interest based ads easier, and things of that nature.

This news is talking about amp image search and you talking about amp post. First visit this URL https://twitter.com/zenexer/status/1265633022709301249 and understand what this post want to tell us.

> How does anyone think this is a good idea?

Isn't Malte Ubl one of the developer/architect behind it? I could be wrong about this but I remember reading his notes/thoughts on AMP last year.

Malte tweeted about this 8 hours ago actually: "Just heard from the Image Search team that this is an oversight and they'll add the feature! Sorry about that and thanks for the report!" https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/1265688067706245120

The already proclaimed their desire to get rid of the URL. I don't think this is in the interest of the user and more in the interest of market dominance and information filtering.

I wrote an extension to "unamp" the website of a popular Italian newspaper and as soon it reached a thousand users Google banned it and forced Firefox to do the same (shame on you Firefox)

So I guess worse is better we are supposed to accept it or else they'll police us into accepting it.

Can you share more details?

The extension was very simple, it just displayed the content for pages protected by a paywall by changing the display attribute.

To be clear, they use amp to serve pages in the protected area, but the protected content is served in the body of the page, inside an AMP-APP tag, but simply hidden.

The code is few lines long, it could have been one line, but it has to unwrap the shadow dom.

I made it for myself, but then friends started asking for it so I published it on Firefox's extension store and later on on the Chrome's one.

It's been there for a couple of years, nobody complained, I even emailed the newspaper several times to warn them about the "bug" but they never replied back.

It has never been very popular, especially outside Italy, it had around a thousand of installations and about 900 daily users, but on March this year I received a copyright infringement notice from Google, even though Google has no rights on the newspaper's content.

They removed the extension right away and banned me from re-uploading it.

I tried to reach their support many times, never heard back from them.

A few days later Firefox removed the extension as well saying Google contacted them about the copyright infringement.

As of today after at least a dozen emails I haven't been able to speak to a human being.

I don't mind much, I still use it on my systems and it still works even on Firefox mobile (for now)

I tried to upload it under a different name, but apparently I'm forbidden from publishing it again.

Weird detail: the day after Firefox removed it I've been contacted on the email I used to register on Firefox dev website asking me if I wanted to sell the extension.

The newspaper website is https://www.repubblica.it

I'd like to know details.

Maybe read the actual page you are on? Clearly you have identified the Examiner and CNN despite a google url.

I am no fan of AMP, but this criticism is not particularly valid.

What about the URL bar?

For average non techie users, the URL bar isn't particularly helpful. They use page content. And AMP pages do show the original page domain name.

The URL bar is helpful to fighting phishing attacks. It's one of the things everyone at my company, including the non-technical people, is askedt to check before entering information.

Also techie and non-techie people have been using the same browsers for how many decades now? Aren't the majority of people in many countries on the internet? It seems like the average non-techie users succeeded in figuring things out so far.

> The URL bar is helpful to fighting phishing attacks

It would have been nice if client side TLS certificates were more popular. Then your browser could warn you that you're not using your client cert when connecting to a certain website and not allow you to complete the connection. That would be a better solution as opposed to relying on users to manually check the URL.

This is pretty much what we've been saying would happen since the day AMP was fire presented to the public.

I really hope this AMP thing never becomes anything mainstream, it's an atrocious attempt at monopolizing the internet as a whole.

Lots of people were also convinced Google wouldn’t go down that route and would be dismissive of criticism.

I feel like when a company grows to a certain size, we have to drop the “assume good faith” outlook we give to small businesses and individuals and take on “assume bad faith” instead.

As commitees dilute responsibility usually via anonimity (“it is not me, it is the majority”), you should never attribute personal (human) traits to them. Their members deny responsibility: then you must assume the committee is irresponsible (i.e. has no human intent).

So: the committee only wants what the papers say. In this case: benefits.

This always reminds me of the passage about the bank in Grapes of Wrath.

> Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank- or the Company- needs- wants- insists- must have- as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them. These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time. Some of the owner men were a little proud to be slaves to such cold and powerful masters. The owner men sat in the cars and explained. You know the land is poor. You've scrabbled at it long enough, God knows.

http://www.polkagris.nu/wiki/Steinbeck,_John:_Grapes_of_Wrat...

I believe it’s already mainstream :(

I'm seeing AMP in random links non-techy people post all the time, it's depressing and it's become basically 50% of URLs I see posted.

Yep. Google's defacto monopoly powers allows it to create standards and effectively force mainstream acceptance.

AMP really has to go away, its a MITM attack on the internet. Google discontinues so many services, why is AMP not one of them yet?

The worst thing I've seen recently is amp URLs for reddit threads. It's one bad thing (new reddit UI) wrapped in a worse thing (AMP), and getting back to classic reddit takes a lot of gymnastics. The stupid part is that the amp page is indistinguishable from the (new) reddit page (the AMP page comes complete with the "download our app" popup). So I don't see how it's providing any speed/experience benefit.

Exactly. For Reddit the AMP version and the mobile site look almost exactly the same... except the AMP site performs worse due to the AMP restrictions.

So none of the "nice" Reddit mobile site features actually work, and supposed "one-time" annoyances like the "Download the App" pop-up don't get cookied under AMP and continue to annoy on every google search. Insane!

>getting back to classic reddit takes a lot of gymnastics

http://old.reddit.com still works, though

Hope they are sane enough to keep it forever

This isn’t going to be the site that turns up in results, sadly.

I can never get the Open In Reddit app button to work. I’m on iOS and have the latest version of the official reddit app. Which btw is painfully filled with ads.

May I recommend using any 3rd party app for reddit instead of the official app. I use relay on Android and it is great. There are many other options, all of them are better than the official app.

Use the Apollo app. Much better than the official Reddit app. It's more like what Alien Blue was before Reddit killed that.

On Android I have a similar problem; I use Reddit is fun, and so it doesn't open that app; it always wants to download the main app.

Same here, it always sends me to the App Store. I already have the app installed.

Boost for reddit has been working good for me some quite some time now https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rubenmayay...

Make sure to try i.reddit.com in a browser, that's also a good option.

You should really try Apollo.

"The worst thing I've seen recently is amp URLs for reddit threads."

How can I see this very specific example ? I would like to understand exactly what this looks like ...

I am not a reddit user and I don't consume much web content on a phone, which is using Safari on an iPhone ...

Would I need to download google chrome onto my iphone, then do a google search for a reddit thread, then click on that search result ? Or would I see this result in Safari as well ?

Genuinely curious as I would like to recreate this specific result ...

You just search for and find any reddit thread, and it is absolutely just as shittastic in any browser (I am using Safari on iOS).

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/gadgets/commen...

This page is simultaneously encased by AMP, has multiple ways reddit is trying to get me to install an app that isn't going to help me right now as I am hopping between websites--I am going to glance at reddit for ten seconds and then a stackoverflow question and then a bugzilla issue and then a quora thread... the last thing I want right now is to end up in some app--but it also doesn't show me all the comments and is asking me to click through to get them... it used to be I clicked a search result and it showed me the reddit thread, with all the comments and without an app: I liked that :(.

It's something you will routinely see in subreddits. Someone makes a comment wanting to link this thread, and it will say "just have a read of https://google.com/amp/news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322730....

The madenning part is you will see these links when using Firefox or Safari and you'll see them on a desktop. It is of course, not just Reddit thing. I've seen LinkedIn shares look like this.

reddit already plagues me with their pop-up insistence that I use their app instead of my mobile browser. Literally stops me from using it more.

How do you even get amp on reddit urls? I've never come across such a scenario (I use desktop browsers on linux).

I usually get them when I open a Reddit link on Google on iOS.

I agree that AMP is a major attack on the internet, not to mention the fact that it makes it way slower [1] and hard to understand what you're browsing. The worst part is that my friends send me AMP links all the time even though I use DDG to avoid this stuff.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18893808

For me, this is a new and helpful way of thinking about the relative value of DDG over Google.

AMP keeps people on Google owned properties longer[1], so it's a revenue driver.

[1] Via things like taking over swipe motions and the back button on carousel launched pages, for example.

It also allows for very easy tracking across the internet which is the real long term play.

They will also be able to release "unblockable" advertising to amp pages eventually.

Why would Amp allow the ads to be less blockable? Extensions still run

> Google discontinues so many services, why is AMP not one of them yet?

Because Google only discontinues useful services, and AMP is actively harmful (aka of negative usefulness)?

AMP is MITM attack on the internet.

best and most succinct description that I've heard.

because it's a useful MITM attack on the internet

It slows down doing anything that involves it. I end up landing on some jank AMP page, and have to then navigate to the top, and pop up the original link, click it, then wait for the real site to load. Total UX fail

useful to whom?

To Google, of course :-)

After they took away peoples' ability to MITM their own stuff by forcing HTTPS everywhere under the guise of privacy.

If you want to mitm yourself, nobody takes it away from you. Create your own CA, add it to the trusted list, setup your proxy with the keys, and mitm all you want.

You do get the benefit of https even on static sites though. Do you want every network you join to be able to inject any JS they want into pages you're viewing? Https solves that.

Not everyone joined the https party. The additional overhead on sites isn't justified for sites you don't even log into.

Wikipedia says that Amp first started appearing in search results in February of 2016. Some random websites tell me the average Google product death happens about 4 years after it launches (not counting anything that hasn't been killed at all and with some huge error bars). So we should expect AMP to be abandoned sometime between now and never.

Malte Ubl from Google responded via Twitter:[0]

> Just heard from the Image Search team that this is an oversight and they'll add the feature! Sorry about that and thanks for the report!

[0]: https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/1265688067706245120

Sounds like classic Google "Oops after oops": https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

Yup--check out the follow-up thread. https://twitter.com/Zenexer/status/1265696063345786881

Me: When can we expect to see a fix? As of right now, there’s no easy way to visit the original URL.

Malte Ubl: I don't have a timeline. The share menu should help getting the underlying URL!

Me: I’m sure I don’t need to explain how this looks; regardless of your intentions, it comes across as a fairly hollow response. The issue gets a lot of negative attention on HN, someone from Google responds that it was just an accident and will be fixed, but there’s no fix.

Malte Ubl: Sorry, no way to do it in fewer than a couple days.

Me: That sounds like a timeline to me. :)

Yes $300 million every year to Mozille but WHAT SABOTAGE !

I got a new computer (Mac Mini) last week and, as the ritual usually goes, I opened Safari and was about to type “google.com/chrome”, then stopped myself and went to “getfirefox.com” instead. It’s been a while since I gave FF a serious look, and so far I haven’t felt like I’m missing anything.

Next up, I need to change my default search engine to DDG.

What’s a good privacy-oriented, web-based email service? I’ve heard of ProtonMail but haven’t used it.

I migrated from Gmail to Fastmail a couple years ago and I have been happy with it. Migrating existing emails from Gmail into Fastmail was easy, as was setting up forwarding from Gmail to Fastmail for all future emails. The hardest part was just updating accounts across the web to use the new email. Since I'm using a custom domain with Fastmail, I can change account emails to things like foo.com@mydomain.com or bar.net@mydomain.com.

It's also easy to configure a Fastmail account to fetch messages from a Gmail inbox and even send messages via Gmail, for a seamless transition while updating accounts.

Wow, that's a neat feature. I've seen a lot of Fastmail recommendations on HN but none that mentioned this feature. Thanks for bringing it up. I'm probably far from the only person around these parts that wants to migrate off of Gmail but just hasn't made it a priority yet, and this tip certainly helps.

Likewise, it's easy and a sensible thing to do.

Basecamp is coming out with a new email service called HEY on June 15th. It looks like it might be invite-only to start, but we'll see come that date.

https://hey.com/

I've used Fastmail for over a decade, and they have yet to give me a reason to regret that move.

Though it irks me that Google can still rummage through so many of my conversations because my contacts still use Gmail.

I switched to Outlook email. I've been considering changing to Fastmail (considered a few others too), but this is the reason i thought emails are hopeless now. Most people I know are on Gmail.

>What’s a good privacy-oriented, web-based email service? I’ve heard of ProtonMail but haven’t used it.

Been Firefox user out of conviction for 10+ years, made the switch to DuckDuckGo as my main search engine with about a year ago, no regrets. But Gmail? It's sticky.

I have so much stuff tied to my email account and it just sucks looking for alternatives. I'd even happily pay. The main difficulty is finding a service that's as mature, feature-wise, as Gmail and a sensible way to migrate all my stuff (email-logins for major websites, informing clients of the new address, etc).

I think the best compromise is using two accounts for a couple of years, heavily focusing on the non-Gmail one and dropping Gmail once you had no interaction with it for a while. But all the obvious alternatives people post don't quite cut it for me, I've been searching for ages.

I've been "meaning" to switch off of Gmail for years, with all of the issues with Google. I switched to Firefox/Safari a couple years ago, then DDG a year ago..

Finally, a week ago, I switched my email to fastmail. Bought a new domain for 10 years explicitly for that purpose.

I'm slowly migrating everything to them... Every day or two I think of something else that needs to be migrated, and do it. I don't feel a need to rush because I just have them both simultaneously.

I have to say though, Fastmail feels better than Gmail in every way. The UI is fast and snappy, looks clean (with a few themes), includes a calendar and notes. The first month is free, so I figured I'd try it before I decided to go all in. After about 20 minutes I was sold and bought a year subscription...

They have this really cool feature with subdomain forwarding so you can organize things into folders automatically. As I've been migrating emails, I've been giving each service it's own unique email address. Eg `amazon@stores.domain.com` will automatically add the email to my "stores" folder, and I'll see it came from Amazon. I can put unlimited anything before the @ sign, which will be really nice for signing up for one-off forums. If they sell my email address or send spam, I'll know exactly who did it and can just block that address.

They also have a bunch of other features for organization like the "+ addressing" that Gmail has. I definitely recommend checking them out though. I feel so good having an email that won't get shut down

The good thing is you never need to drop your Gmail. I use Fastmail since 4? Years and still get all the mail from all private accounts I've ever had. And they have excellent guides for migration, or so I recall (it's been a while)

get your own domain name. then you can move between webmail providers quite simply: just change the mx records and you can shift between most reponsible providers. it incurs a small cost.

i setup a gmail redirect when i switched to fastmail, that was more than a decade ago. it may or may not still be an option.

There should be a ".well-known" spec for changing email. Currently all we have is one for changing passwords I believe: https://wicg.github.io/change-password-url/

2 years, mailbox.org has worked well for me, and has active-sync support.

Maybe you can setup your new service to pull email from your Gmail account via POP3 or something, so you still only need to login to one account. Then you can gradually move further and further away from the Gmail account.

Fastmail, protonmail, migadu to name a few. Personally I use migadu because the pricing is perfect for my needs but I've used ProtonMail a bit and been pretty happy with it as well.

You probably get an email address with your ISP as well. The downside is switching ISPs when you use their domain, but if you're happy with them and don't plan on switching, it might be an option.

At work we use Runbox (Norwegian if I'm not mistaken), works well and iirc the pricing is affordable also for individuals.

A new ISP in the Netherlands, set up in response to XS4ALL being killed by the parent company, offers email hosting with a custom domain for 50 euros a year (domain included I think). I personally have high expectations there. For more context on what XS4ALL did and stood for aside from privacy, see https://hn.algolia.com/?q=XS4ALL

Self hosting is also pretty easy if you don't mind getting your hands dirty for an evening or two to set it up. (For me it has been hands-off most of the time, aside from upgrading to new hardware every few years.)

I really like Fastmail

What's wrong with Safari?

This month?

https://gist.github.com/iansltx/18caf551baaa60b79206#gistcom...

The only issue there is developers not being able to keep up with the rapid pace at which Safari is still strengthening privacy protection even in the middle of a pandemic, as far as I can tell.

Blocking third party cookies by default and requiring requests for storage access all sounds great.

I've been happily using Protonmail for the past 2 years. It's not going to have all the bells and whistles of Gmail, but I'm a minimalist so it's perfect for me.

Or just use Safari.

Edge is really good too! It is fast and has decent developer console. It has lots of content filtering options built-in too.

AMP results are annoying enough on mobile that I switched my default search engine to duckduckgo on my phone.

For reportedly being there to accelerate the web, AMP pages remain consistently slower and less reliable than the original websites for me.

I'm still against AMP on a conceptual ground, but it is so much faster and more reliable than traditional page loading on my phone. Pages can't have megabytes of JavaScript and huge images. It's served by Google's fast CDN instead of some far-away server.

With amp I basically do "find the page, edit url to remove amp, load again" dance. It is definitely not faster.

examples?

Every site in Germany is 10 X bigger in normal browsing compared to AMP.

AMP is the number one reason for my usage of "load the desktop site" toggle on my phone.

I did the same, and am slowly switching over other computers too as I remember. The quality of search result is high enough that I can't tell the difference.

Search engines are too important to leave in the hands of one company. Especially a company that, though it was founded as a search engine company, has that search engine as only a tiny part of its people-tracking machine.

DDG has the ability to save your entire configuration setup ("open links in new window", etc.) in a common URL string - after getting it set up the way you like, go here: https://start.duckduckgo.com/settings

On the right is "Show Bookmarklet & Settings", click to open and you'll see your URL to bookmark. As I use standard Firefox/Chrome sync for bookmarks, I just had to save it once in either browser and it shows up on all devices exactly how I like/want.

Same. And it's been maddening, because while DDG is fine and sometimes better for desktop work (code questions, stack overflow, professional stuff), I find it far inferior for mobile stuff (getting around, local recommendations, shopping, etc.).

But if that's what it takes to get the real web, so be it.

I did the same, I don't plan on going back to Google as my search engine.

There's definitely a psychological element to it. I find I just don't trust search results with pictures next to them as much as I trust plaintext search results. The years and years of simple google results has trained me to be suspicious of noisier search result pages.

Ditto, for all the good reasons to use DDG, AMP is what retrained me into searching DDG first. Each time I landed on an AMP page it was a reminder to change my default search engine on that browser/device.

Idk I really appreciate the lack of cookie popups and subscribe to this and that popups that can occupy almost the entire screen bedoree being dismissed on mobile.

So Google don't do tracking on Amp pages, or they're breaking EU law?

I switched all my default search to DuckDuckGo a few months ago because of stuff like this. No regrets here. If you haven't tried it recently, give it a shot. It's gotten tons better in the past few years. Once you get used to it, it's as good as Google search.

I've been using DDG as my default search engine for more or less a year now, and tbh I find myself using the !g bang way more often than I'd like. Basically anytime I'm searching for something dev related or anything that's broad enough that without my personal user info it would be hard to return the results I'm looking for. Which is kind of the crux of the issue I believe. For everything that's wrong with Google as a company in terms of privacy-related issues, the truth , at least for me, is that many times (not all) it ends up being... quite convenient I guess.

YMMV though, maybe I need to step up my searching game to obtain better results using DDG. That's definitely something I should work on.

Replace !g with !s to get Startpage results, which is basically proxied Google results. Although I would advise just not relying on Google at all. The perception is that it's better, but in recent years I've found Google results to be total trash.

"YMMV though, maybe I need to step up my searching game to obtain better results using DDG. That's definitely something I should work on."

Yeah, I had the same exact feeling a couple of month ago and created this [0].

[0] https://www.runnaroo.com

It really isn't as good. I want DDG to be awesome. I'm not in the Google ecosystem, and don't care for their business practices. I would be happy to dump them.

But Google search is noticeably much, much better. They've got us over a barrel.

I kept seeing comments on HN about how DDG was as good as Google, so i've switched on one of my machines. It isn't.

For stuff that doesn't matter too much, or is an easy search, i use DDG, then fall back to Google if i don't find what i need. For anything serious, i just open up a Google tab :(

I completely agree. I loaned a friend an old phone, and it took him a couple months to even realize ddg was default search and not google.

And there are so many nice features, like the !bangs search prefixes, and the ability to store and sync your preferences as a passphrase, without requiring an actual account.

The dark scheme is also quite good.

the only gripe i have with DDG is missing 'site: "somewebsite.com"' option. Is there a way to achieve it?

I mainly use it for '*.countrydomain' to get results for a specific country.

DDG has basically equivalent results for most things, but I find that I use !g for programming stuff enough that I've gone back to just using the Google site for those searches. It feels like Google has better results for more recent programming topics.

Most programming searches are just stack overflow, at least for me. So, I just add `!so` to the search in DDG. It's the same as using "site:stackoverflow.com #{what_youre_looking_for}"

Now if we can just get people to stop saying "Google it" instead of "search it" or something else which doesn't involve being a constant two-legged advertisement for Google, maybe others will start to realize they have options.

AMP is the worst. It breaks the web and should just die.

Tell me about it. Our company moved to it and its been horrible with any third party application or marketing pixel.

My boss tried to warn VPs of AMP being a nuclear option. Instead of fixing the website they rather put a bandaid over it.

> Our company moved to it and its been horrible with any third party application or marketing pixel.

Isn't that part of the point though? 3rd party marketing and tracking pixels are NOT things that improve the experience or performance for the visitor.

Can you tell me more about AMP? First time hearing about it (maybe I do live under a rock), but I always thought it was convenient to see news results up top that open up fast.

Hi all! I'm an engineer who worked on this feature. I can't speak to the general concerns about AMP, but I can say that we didn't remove the original url here intentionally - we actually never added it to the Images version. Sorry for the oversight, we're working on bringing it back now!

I’ve been trying to get a straight answer out of google for a while on this, wondering if you can clear it up.

Does Chrome mobile’s “articles for you” section prioritize AMP content along with Google news?

From my experience this seems to be the case. I find it alarming as the only sites that support AMP are often the big clickbait news fear factories. Meanwhile the little sites who never bloated their pages with tracking scripts in the first place end up getting screwed.

Hi team!

Is there a way AMP could have an opt-out option? (maybe a permanent setting, maybe a per-search trigger) Ideally at user discretion, but I suppose it must be enabled by the first-party content provider (the website).

That would make everyone happier I think. I don't mind AMP some of the time, but sometimes it's undesirable for security concerns notably.

Sorry, but the AMP team doesn't have much credibility left. Sounds like you just got caught with your hand in the cookie jar.

Are you and your team generally aware of the concerns about AMP? What does the AMP team think about how negatively pretty much the entire world views it?

https://www.ruinedby.design/

Please read this book. The future internet will thank you.

ah, the good ol’ goopsie again for the N-th time.

Google is really showing it's anti-competitive hand here. AMP is a plague.

I'd really love to hear the perspective from engineers working on this inside of Google.

How do they perceive the work that they're doing?

Do they see the harm it causes, or do they only believe in the promise of the good it gives?

When we engaged the AMP team early in it's lifecycle to try and dissuade Google from it's course, it was very apparent that the AMP team, and especially it's lead, Malte Ubl, strongly believe that Google is the web, and AMP is the only way to "save" the web from being app-ized by things like Facebook Instant Articles, which seems to be the existential threat Google is scared of.: https://www.facebook.com/facebookmedia/solutions/instant-art...

Obviously, the AMP team does not, in any way, believe the web needs to be saved from Google.

It's been a while since I read the AMP project website, but my impression was that it was written by people who drank a lot of the Kool-Aid. There's probably a lot of people working there who believe that AMP is good, but we can't discount the compliance created by the exorbitant pay and prestige of working at Google.

There also seems to be a healthy amount "oh, well that's more of a Google search issue, not AMP as such so I have nothing to do with that" denialism.

I note that Terrence Eden did excellent work getting the concept of "how do users opt out of AMP results" on to the steering group, but it is notable that no work appears to have happened on it for more than a year now.

Google seems to be slowly self-immolating.

I've stopped using Google Chrome and Google Search. The only time I use Google Search now is when DuckDuckGo doesn't quite deliver and then I do so using an incognito window. Next step will be to ditch Gmail, and then Google Cloud & Firebase.

This might sound silly coming from a lone developer in South Africa, but my experience is that we live in the future, and developers with a mass intuition is rarely wrong. If the trend continues, then in 10 years' time this will be the popular view.

They're making their money, the US probably will never slap them with any meaningful antitrust lawsuits, and they also see China as a long term investment, so there's no reason to see them as self-immolating. Maybe they're doing so for people in the know, like those of us on HN, but most of the world doesn't see it the way you do. To most of the world, Google is still that innovative company with the friendly looking logo that makes gadgets.

>> when DuckDuckGo doesn't quite deliver

Which is 90% of the time when you are looking for IT questions. Unfortunately. I am hoping they are going to get better, it would be so good to finally stop google search.

I use DDG exclusively, and many of my searches are technical. I haven't found any cases where DDG fails to find something that Google finds.

I'm not suggesting that it never happens, but it's certainly not anywhere close to 90%, or even 9%.

Which queries in particular? I've found duckduckgo to be quite useful especially for IT questions because it actually listens when I tell it to search a phrase verbatim. If I try to google an error then I keep getting all kinds of stuff that is vaguely related but with no mention of that particular error whatsoever.

I have to agree that DDG seems to struggle with developer terms, but that is probably a cost of not knowing that I'm a developer. E.g. compare search results on Google and DDG for "Rust http". Google knows I'm looking for a crate, but first result on Duck is for the Steam game, Rust.

They're getting much better.

Why can't they just give a simple setting which lets users disable AMP? This is the most annoying about being forced to use AMP.

You being able to opt out of AMP would defeat the purpose of AMP.

The best way to opt-out is to switch to another search provider like DuckDuckGo.

You'd also have to switch to another internet, where people weren't constantly posting AMP link landmines to dodge on forums and social media.

There are browser add-ons that do exactly this for you.

Not for mobile.

How do you get AMP pages? Do they appear in Google search results when you look stuff up on a mobile phone?

Yes, being AMP also grants you priority ranking in certain parts of their UI

Who's being forced to use AMP? The user? Remember, the user is the product.

Basically, Google is penalizing webmasters who do NOT support AMP (also by rewarding competitors who DO support it); if you depend on Google search results for a significant portion of your traffic, not having AMP will impact your business.

And the publishers are somewhat coerced into implementing it, at the cost of being downranked if they don't.

The product is being forced to use AMP.

Time to share this one again before it's too late:

How to fight back against Google AMP https://markosaric.com/google-amp/

And the original thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21712733

I wonder if it's being A/B tested. I still see the URL, and can click on it from the little "i" icon at the top left. Android, Chrome, USA.

Surely a terrible idea though. AMP already has a PR problem.

A/B testing whether or not people have finally gotten tired of fighting for the web. Once they can go for a few months without anybody speaking up, they'll move on to further stages.

It's illegal to do that in the EU, so probably only affects non-EU terretories.

An alternative possibility is that the original site doesn't have a non-amp alternative, so no original link is included.

AMP is an obvious attempt to embrace/extend/extinguish the open web, so yes it has a PR problem.

My unpopular opinion. I love AMP. Mobile internet for me ( maybe on worse devices ), was becoming a non-thing for me. AMP let's me check the news again.

My opinion might be because I don't have much understanding of it as a framework, but from a non power user perspective, I've found the UX to be amazing.

For me, the UX is terrible on mobile. On my device it breaks the auto-hide behavior of the chrome address bar - normally when you scroll down the address bar hides, but with AMP only the thin AMP bar hides when scrolling down. On some websites they only display a portion of the website content on AMP (ex. Reddit, although it seems like they have fixed this now), so to see all of the website content I have to click out of the AMP page to view the full page, and then click again to expand whatever content I was trying to view in the first place. And when I want to view the original web page I have to click this little "i" icon to reveal the actual web page link rather than them just putting a link to the original web page in the amp header directly.

AMP in part made me switch to Apple News - it's buggy and doesn't respect browser history (major usability failure on Google's part).

Regrettably Apple News will occasionally drop sections of the content it doesn’t know how to render properly, leaving the news article bafflingly incomplete, and usually it’s not obvious that something is missing.

Apple News is kind of a meh walled garden of itself.

Did you like Google News content better? If not, why wasn't content quality a reason to switch before?

Thanks for sharing. I'm an AMP hater but I legitimately want to hear the defense of AMP and I'm having a hard time finding it

I have never liked AMP and I really don't like this. I also find myself wondering if this has any security implications.

I mean if AMP effectively disguises the original URL could it not be used for phishing?

To be clear I know very little about AMP and if this is the case

Regardless it just adds complexity and makes it that much harder to teach people what is an acceptable URL when it comes to email links etc...

It uses Signed HTTP Exchanged.

https://blog.amp.dev/2018/05/08/a-first-look-at-using-web-pa...

Thanks!

For anyone on the fence about using DuckDuckGo instead of Google, if you don't find what you're looking for, it's easy to revert to a Google search by typing "!google" with your query.

DDG has improved a lot with time, so I almost never fall back to Google anymore.

For some technical searches that DDG can't find, I find codeseek.com is better than both Google and DDG

if typing "!google" is too much of a hassle "!g" also works. you can also do pretty much any letter and it will search another service from bing to yahoo to images to maps to wikipedia to whatever.

I often use !hn in DuckDuckGo, which redirects to this website’s search.

You only need to type g! (or !g - it works either way)

!g for the lazy!

For the even lazier, here's a Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey script that adds a "Google" button to the DDG results page. Just click it if you don't like DDG's results and you'll be taken to Google for the same search term.

Source - https://gist.github.com/m-thomson/611d8a91dcc27008dd4fc404d5...

Screenshot - https://imgur.com/a/qoJ6xuc

Tested in Firefox but should work in Chrome (why are you using Chrome!?).

Started using DuckDuckGo just to avoid AMP, the search results aren’t as good, but at least the results are usable.

Previously I'd considered AMP a storm in a teacup. Now I think it's enough that I'll switch my mobile device to DDG, something I thought I'd never say.

For some reason on my iPhone AMP pages just don't fit on the screen. Maybe it's because I have a large default zoom/font. But this actually makes them unreadable because pinch-to-zoom is almost always disabled. I have a bookmark workaround for that but honestly I don't think it's ever worked.

Only recently did I discover a workaround for this: on Safari you can force touch to bring up a preview of the original site then click on it to bring that up.

If this change breaks that functionality then something has to change. That could be by using a browser to pretend to be a desktop browser or it could be DDG. I'm not sure yet.

Why do I, as a user, not have the ability to opt out of this horrible broken mess?

I'm all for having Web pages that render fast. I really hope for Google's sake that rendering speed alone is what affects ranking and there isn't some boost for AMP directly because that has anticompetitive written all over it. It would be forcing sites to adopt AMP or suffer downranking (to be fair, companies are typically terrible at designing fast-rendering websites).

So if if DDG gets me out of AMP and I can somehow set it so I get Google search results by default (instead of Bing) without using !g on every search then honestly at this point, I'm in.

I Googled "how to turn off amp results" and the top article is a 2017 article[1] that lists some workarounds, such as using duckduckgo or installing DeAMPify, "an Android app that lets you bypass AMP links so you can always load the original link." As far as a first-party way to disable it, the article says:

>"Late last year [2016], Google said that it’s working to let users disable AMP in Google search, but there doesn’t seem to be any official kill switch yet. Meanwhile, you can use any of the above workarounds to get around Google AMP pages."

Can any Googler chime in on why it would take more than 4 years to figure out the code to turn off a feature like AMP for signed-in users who don't want it? I would have thought that this is something anyone could do in 20 minutes, but I do realize that Google has thousands of highly paid and experienced engineers so maybe there is something that takes a lot longer, that I didn't realize. Could you shed some insight on what makes this difficult?

[1] https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/disable-google-amp-google-sear...

This is exactly what people speculated would eventually happen when they first announced AMP. Google continues to disappoint and harm the internet in a very predictable way, year after year.

Personally, I hate AMP. Especially when it comes to reddit results.

If I tap on the share button on the top right of the AMP frame, it seems that I am able to copy the original URL (although it's the specialized amp.knowyourmeme.com version of the page)

For those who are okay to install addons on your browser, there is Redirect AMP to HTML addon[0] on Firefox. I'm sure there is something similar for Chrome.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/

I never looked deep into this but I remember that back in the day there was the "View original image" link in image search and I think they got rid of it because of some EU directive that stated that they can't link an image directly but rather provide a link to the original source, that is the website? Or am I completely wrong?

That was a result of the Getty Images lawsuit [1].

1: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...

Sharing AMP links is the worst. I probably wouldn't mind if they had a way to provide short links that cardified okay in slack, but lately I've been just sharing the link to the original.

if anyone else prefers to share the original link, you can probably find the article by searching on duckduckgo. Using their search more often now these days.

Haven't tried it, but there is this Firefox extension to help you stay away from AMP: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/

I can kind of understand why Google wants to do AMP. Mobile web performance and all. It probably scores better at some metric that someone believes passionately in (to the exclusion of all else). I don't think it's worthwhile overall, but I can understand it.

What I can't understand is why it has to be managed so badly. Just put the damn URL there for people who want it. Allow opt out for people who want that. Super easy.

Even if the plan is to cynically use leverage to railroad through adoption of AMP, you're not going to win over the people who despise AMP. There's nothing to be be gained by twisting arms like this. You're only making enemies. Just throw a bone to the people don't like AMP, and the rest of the people will go along with AMP anyway because they don't care.

Correction:

The original URL is provided by the Share button on the right. But it's not a link. (To visit it, you'd have to copy and paste back into the browser. You can't share a link to the app you are shared from )

So the URL is available as always, but the link is not.

For those of us who had no fucking idea what AMP stands for here's the link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages

If you're looking for a decent replacement to images.google.com, I run https://canweimage.com. It gets results from Wikimedia Commons. There's also just https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. I built canweimage because Wikimedia Commons used to be harder to navigate (once you searched, you then had to click through categories and subcategories to see image results). Looking at it just now, and that doesn't seem to be the case anymore!

I always chuckle to myself when people are quick to attack amazon/facebook as being the real evil companies....while google has been slowly taking over the internet these past 10 years.

They're all companies. They'll take as much as they can. It's just how companies are. Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing them.

More than 10. Chrome came out in 2008.

This is so unfriendly to users. I don't understand the push to obscure URLs. They are sometimes hiding the URLs in search results also which is infuriating. One more reason to use DuckDuckGo.

Another thing that is extremely annoying is the hiding of urls in Chrome. Hiding the protocol and the rest of the url besides the domain. When you go to click up in the url/address bar to change a section of the site the protocol re-appears and messes you up.

Or when you click in on some mobile and the whole url disappears and you just wanted to change part of the url.

Yes Google there are still people that want hackable urls, I remember when that was something they pushed, clean urls that make sense so you can type in where you are going.

AMP might be the thing that actually brings anti-trust, so not needed and very anti-competitive using their monopoly position to stifle competition and innovation rather than extend innovation and compete on product. Google should reward fast sites not band-aid it with an anti-competitive AMP. AMP also creates lots more work for content companies and it is only useful for Google. Essentially content companies are doing Google's work for them.

McKinsey and the management consultants have taken over large swaths of Google with stuff like this and AMP.

Here's hoping some pirate product people/engineers put up a flag and start returning to product over management metrics.

Yeah the hiding of the protocol in the URL was a pain to deal with. I updated Chrome today and looks like there's a way to turn this off:

1. Enable chrome://flags/#omnibox-context-menu-show-full-urls

2. Right click the address bar

3. Select 'Always show full URLs'

Instead of seeing: news.ycombinator.com You'll now see: https://news.ycombinator.com

I made a Tell HN post about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322705

The push is to get you to stay at Google. They are hurting real bad because people are typing "amazon.com" searching for shopping queries on Amazon now instead of Google; Google hates that.

Google wants to be the gatekeeper of the internet. It wants to be the middleman between everything you do online. Might you be using Google Chrome right now? Or Android? ;0

Google is an evil and destructive force in technology and it genuinely baffles me that people trust their email and smartphone operating systems to be guarded by an advertising company.

It is a huge shame that the AMP AC seems to have completely dropped any work on the following focus card on their Github - https://github.com/ampproject/meta-ac/projects/1#card-194203...

Overwhelmingly that's the main user request for AMP. The lack of progress and the fact that it disappeared from the 2020 priorities with no progress speaks volumes.

I’m not an expert in the details of Chrome permissions vs. other browsers, and setting aside for the moment the market power of Google/Alphabet, this seems fairly fixable, along the same lines as email spam or ad tracker networks, and a clear case for “caveat emptor”.

How about rewriting any AMP urls in the browser location bar to redirect to the canonical location as an end-user extension, or as an in-content script?

I don't understand why Reddit specifically puts up with AMP.

They already have a "good" mobile site. The AMP pages break reddit results and result in the constant annoyance of having to dismiss "Open in App?" banners both in the AMP view and on the mobile site. Everyone hates the AMP page. Why keep it? You already invested a ton of resources in the fast/nice mobile app...

AMP is a terrifying solution to an awful problem.

Am I the only one who likes AMP? Like 99% of news websites etc. are so overloaded with crap to the point where it's impossible to read them on mobile. I'm glad to see an AMP link, it means the content will load quickly.

I feel like we need a solution that works for everyone, not just news companies and search giants, but users as well!

"Just heard from the Image Search team that this is an oversight and they'll add the feature! Sorry about that and thanks for the report!"

https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/1265688067706245120

Seems like a short sighted move since image search is one of the few times I'll jump from DuckDuckGo to Google. Probably won't bother if I can't pull the source image url

https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=google+images

I could buy their reasoning for AMP and site speed, if and only if they make it easy to get the URL.

When it first came out you couldn't get the URL either and they added it after people complained.

The removal seems to make it clear that it's really about control and keeping things within the confines of their own system.

Is AMP popular in the US only? (I am from the Netherlands)

As far as I know I have never seen an AMP website. I use DDG as search engine but !g a lot, so I assume I should have stumbled upon an AMP site at least once.

But maybe it is also browser related? When I go to amp.cnn.com I get redirected to editions.cnn.com in Firefox.

AMP is "Accelerated Mobile Pages". Are you on mobile?

Yes I am.

To think their motto used to be "don't be evil"... pretty insidious in retrospect.

The thing is, from their point of view they aren't evil; they are "making the web faster", they say (and they're not wrong) that most sites are so full of crap like trackers and adverts that it negatively impacts your browsing experience.

This Twitter post costs me 1.6MB of bandwidth and it keeps pinging for more stuff, and that's with an ad blocker enabled. While we're talking just bytes in terms of the main message.

Google is selling it as an improvement to the web, but that also says a lot about websites.

But this has been Google's strategy for a while now; they push technology that make the web faster and accessible to more people (like Chrome, HTTP/2 and 3, webp/webm, google DNS, google fiber (discontinued), Android, etc) and score goodwill, but at the same time they know if people can browse faster they will run into Google ads more often, earning them more money.

AMP is no different; if a site that doesn't even have google ads takes 10 seconds to load, they earn nothing. If the same content takes <1 second to load, WITH google ads, they earn money. And they earn money more often because people can consume more content instead of wait for things to load.

Amp-the-standard is not the same thing as amp-the-google-UX.

I'd love for sites to adopt AMP, as a standard for web design which leads to very lean sites without content pop-in. That'd be awesome! Give me a little icon next to the search result that says "this site is AMP certified" so I know it'll be fast.

But what I don't love, is that Google uses AMP as a trojan horse to keep me inside the google search results as I browse the internet, by:

- Rehosting the amp sites on their CDN

- Pre-rendering sites I haven't clicked yet to make them load faster

- Putting the site in some pop-over div which makes me feel like I'm still in the google results (so I can pop right back quickly and spend more time on google!)

- Breaking the swipe gesture

- Breaking the URL bar

- Breaking my phone's auto-hide for the URL bar

- etc etc

OK, see if we keep using Google for image search, then. Bing was already better at that anyway.

Google gives me slightly better results (sometimes much better, much of the time about equal), but I prefer Bing's interface. If you want to stop using Google, Bing Images is a good option to replace the vast majority of image searches.

In my opinion everyone should do the following:

- Install an Ad Blocker, so Google will not be able to make money on your visits and chances you'll get a malware from ads will decrease - If you use Android, you can install Firefox and add uBlock Origin as extension, because Google abuse their power and prevent people from installing Ad blocker on Android. - Stop paying money for Google Ads - Stop using Gmail. There are plenty of alternatives (ex. outlook.com) - Use other search engines (bing.com and yandex.com). I noticed they work in many cases better than Google. For example, yandex.com is much better for semi-legal content which is blocked on Google and not available at all. - Stop using GCP. AWS and Azure are the better cloud providers. - Stop supporting AMP on your website - Don't pay money for integrating Google Maps into your website. There are much cheaper alternatives. - Office 365 is years ahead of Google Docs.

Out of all Google projects that they put to the grave, they commit to this stupid service.

AMP is the one reason why Duck Duck Go is now my default search engine on mobile.

There are so many times when using google news app where the story half loads, or the main part of the story is missing... now I can't even go to the actual site and read the new because the link is gone. Goodbye google news.

What about Facebook instant articles and Apple News? Are these better than AMP?

Okay, so besides all the "told you so", "Google is evil" and "I hate AMP":

Has anybody actually seen the behavior described in this tweet by some anonymous guy? Because I can't confirm it so far.

Yes, I tried the query in the sample, and it works exactly the same for me here. Are you saying you also get a link to the original URL in the popup?

I just tested again with Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi and Firefox on Android and can confirm now, too (except for Firefox). First I only checked on desktop where you get to the original website.

It's not often any more that when I search for an image that Google Image Search is my last stop. I use DDG, so when I need an image I try any of !gi !bi !yi or just !i

Generally Google Images are the worst.

Non-web coder here.

I searched 'google amp', and I can't really understand what it's supposed to do?

Can anyone explain what problem AMP is supposed solve, or what features it brings to the table?

Amp is supposed to reduce file size and script overhead. Its seemingly innocent goal was to speed up page loading on slower mobile devices and reduce bandwidth usage. Google then cached entire amp versions of articles on their servers and never load the original when searchers or Google news app users click to read an article. It means the authors of the articles web pages never get hit by readers. This is I think the main reason why website owners are quite upset.

You're only half right. While Amp is designed to create small pages, what's more important is that they should be safely-embeddable. That means there's no potentially unsafe scripts or asset requests. That why Amp uses a subset of HTML as defined via WebComponents.

>Google then cached entire amp versions of articles on their servers

That's the Amp Cache. The cache allows vendors like Google, Microsoft, and Cloudflare (who each run their own caches) to automatically preload these pages in search results without there being any risk to the user. Yes, Bing runs a copy too.

https://amp.dev

It's supposedly a component framework. supposedly you can build web stuff faster and easier using it. In reality it looks like Google is using it a Trojan horse

It's direction is no-longer owned by Google, but by the OpenJS Foundation, right?

AMP makes work easier for Google (their indexing and content presentation process). However it's presented as something that makes it easier for us the general public.

AMP is hated so much by HN and yet content creators are opting in to use it. They must be getting something out of it.

HN is not representative.

https://github.com/tycrek/degoogle.

This seems like the kind of thing that will be labeled (maybe rightly, maybe falsely) as a "mistake" and fixed... It really seems like if this AMP proxy stuff is going to get forced down our throats, then viewing the original version needs to be integrated at the protocol level and exposed out through the browser UI, not the website (which would also make it possible for non-Google browsers to opt out, as an extra bonus). Otherwise, this sort of thing is just going to keep on happening.

Interestingly : could this lead to Google violating copyright laws ?

As long as Google is "only" a search engine, referencing other websites, it can get away with copyright laws by stating that he's not infringing, only showing infringing website...

But if Google serve the image by itself, with its own domain, doesn't it make him responsible for its own copyright infringement ? Maybe that we be a way to kill the behemoth... or at least this stupid "feature"...

Another one of those weird "mistakes" that always, always flows towards Google and against everyone else.

I see a lot of hate for AMP, and rightly so. I've been able to get rid of it completely on my Android device with two tricks:

- Changed my browser for Kiwi browser : very close to Chrome but with some neat features, one of them being to automatically redirect AMP links to original links

- deAMPify is a way to redirect AMP links from any other app than the browser

I really wish there was a way to opt-out of AMP as on iOS you're definitely SOL

if you're on Android use Firefox as your main browser, if you wanna avoid the shit called AMP. on iOS safari does a little better on showing the url. Changing search engines to say Bing, is not really helpful. Bing on chromium android, still shows AMP pages.

Is there any way to get the url out of an image search anymore without going through AMP?

Slow trek back to the AOL-style walled garden 2.0 but paved with good intentions?

Is it an iOS thing? I can't reproduce this on my laptop using Firefox

In mobile Google News you don't see URLs either (which bugs me)

and now they own the content. Links will be created to that google URL that last decades. And google can replace the data at that link with whatever they want, whenever they want.

Google is overdue on regulators cracking down on their BS

Twitter thread suggests it’s a bug that will be fixed.

AMP should die.

What is "AMP?"

Critical info that's missing.

I'd guess they'll go next after DOM manipulation in browsers. It's how we remove ads afterall.

Another reason to stop using Google search

How long until AMP is stAMPed out with a good ol' Anti-Trust

Antitrust suit rumors are swirling and Google is more and more boldly manifesting its despotic tendencies, as if in defiance.

No surprise here, Google is now full on 90's - style Microsoft, with a twist of SJW thrown in, and hipsters everywhere.

  Some website: "I did this"
  *walks away as Google approaches*
  Google: ... "I did this"

Seriously, though. I understand why the general public isn't pushing back against this, but why don't I see more push back from websites? Websites support AMP for SEO, but at this point they should be trying to redirect users away from AMP and social media sites should be trying to automatically strip AMP from links.

And why does the "Redirect AMP to HTML" extension on Firefox have so few users?

Wait, AMP still exists? I haven't seen it for a while now, also in google search results (though I don't do many of those). I thought it was dead after literally everyone thought it was a terrible idea.

I suppose I'm happy the google crawler is still banned from my domains. People should use something else if they want good results now.

Does uBlock or privacy badger block it? It seems out of scope for those projects so I expect I should see amp links just like anyone else. Or did they kill it in the EU or something? I saw someone from NL wondering the same elsewhere in the thread.

I understand the objections to Google's actions--this is clearly a dick move which is terrible for both users and content creators--but I'm not understanding the AMP hate here.

As a user, AMP is great. AMP is a better implementation of the open web than HTML is. It's a (usually) self-contained document that isn't tightly coupled to the server it came from. You can download an AMP document, render it, attach it to an email to a friend, etc., without having to log in or get tracked. Unfortunately AMP is adding ad capabilities, but at least AMP allows you to strip those out fairly trivially.

As a website, if you want your users tightly coupled to your server, just don't implement AMP? You literally went through non-negligible effort to implement a feature and now you're surprised and angry that it works the way you implemented it. AMP was always a bad idea if you wanted users to be dependent on your website for your content--this has only made it a slightly worse idea. And by the way, if all you want is credit for your content, it's trivial to add a linked byline to the top of your AMP.

I'm not defending Google here. They're an amoral corporation with too much power and shouldn't be used, period. But AMP is fine.

EDIT: I can only assume the silent down-voters are people who implemented AMP and are whining that what they implemented works. ;P

> AMP is a better implementation of the open web than HTML is.

Except the results of AMP can be done without AMP. It just requires site owners to not put a bunch of crap on the site. Something that AMP requires you to do.

> You can download an AMP document, render it, etc., without having to log in or get tracked

Except for the fact that now only Google tracks you. Also, doable without AMP.

The hate from many isn't about being a website owner. It's about being a website user. When I click on a link of a website, I expect to go to that website. Not stay on Google's site.

> Except the results of AMP can be done without AMP. It just requires site owners to not put a bunch of crap on the site. Something that AMP requires you to do.

Sure, you can build self-contained HTML pages, but you don't have any way of indicating to browsers or search engines that what you've created can be consumed in that way.

> The hate from many isn't about being a website owner. It's about being a website user. When I click on a link of a website, I expect to go to that website. Not stay on Google's site.

That's a great objection to Google not linking to the original site.

It's not an objection to AMP. Nothing about AMP prevents Google from linking to the original site.

The silent down-voters are more likely site owners who feel they are being coerced into using AMP in order to compete in Google's search rankings, or users who feel they are being forced to visit AMP sites (which have various usability or privacy concerns) due to these site owners being coerced.

(For what it's worth, I up-voted you).

Sure--but that's the result of society giving too much power to Google, not the result of AMP.

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