It's ironic to me that AMP is a problem we all brought upon ourselves, really. It's almost (jokingly) a Prisoner's dilemma [1]. Had no one ever opted into it, it probably would have just been swept under the rug by Google, and a win-win for us all. But since a competitor of yours (<i>probably</i>) opted into it to get ahead of you, you now <i>have</i> to opt into it also, to compete and get the same SEO "power juice" it gave them. The fact that everyone now adds the code to their site to make it work with AMP is the problem. Google gave us the rope. And then all the SEO managers/marketers/specialists hung us with it. Ha<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma</a>
Just came to say I hate amp. If I want to go to a site I want that site not a google cache of it. It’s not a better experience. It just means another click to get to where I was going. Stop the madness Google kill amp.
Arguably this means that Google is breaking point 11 of their own AMP Cache Guidelines [1]. If I ran any AMP pages, I would be quite upset.<p>1: <a href="https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-cache-guidelines.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-c...</a>
When I attended the Drupal Europe 2018 conference I had the opportunity to talk to Barb Palser of the AMP global relations team. I asked her in an intentionally innocent way: "I thought AMP is supposed to replace RSS, but from the presentation it seems like it's trying to be a better HTML?" to which she replied yes. I acted all optimistic, so she wouldn't be defensive, but this conversation sent chills down my spine and I remember it to this day.
When AMP was introduced I assumed the actual content would be loaded from the canonical URL anyway. This whole in-between caching layer G introduced is very weird.<p>Also, I think what AMP was pitted against--Facebook instant articles--no longer exists, or at least doesn't particularly matter (now that FB is several pivots beyond the whole 'newsfeed is full of articles' stage).
AMP links are a major reason I switched to duckduckgo on mobile. Google seems to be shortsighted in doing this.<p>Yes, only a tiny minority of technical users will know what amp pages are and switch search engines to avoid them. But, a larger group will likely find the amp pages <i>annoying</i>, even if they can't precisely articulate why. This weakens google's hold on the market.
<tinfoil>
What if it's not a bug, but Google testing user response
</tinfoil><p>(assuming Google is not stupid so Hanlon's razor may not apply)
This seems to be a way for Google to make revenue from news sites and is a clear abuse of monopoly power. When I click on an AMP news link, I see a “carousel” at the top that shows multiple news articles. I can go to various articles on a topic by swiping left or right, all without going back to the news site.<p>But now that Google has removed the link to visit the site, it is clear they don’t want you to visit the actual news site but do everything through Google.<p>This means that only the Google ad network will be allowed, so they stand to benefit from this arrangement, and news sites can have no hope of receiving any traffic.
Yes! I’ve been having this issue for days but assumed it was just me. It is particularly frustrating for sites like Reddit where the AMP version is too aggressively cached and misses most of the recent comments.
I don't know anything about AMP, so I'm genuinely amazed that one could create bugs in it that just downright break hyper references.<p>I though links was a pretty important part of HTML, and so people took care to ensure they work?
Interesting, I didn't even consider that could be a bug. I just assumed that was how AMP was supposed to behave and moved to Duckduckgo for mobile search.
I'm surprised I haven't seen more discussion on the actual bug in the comments. In the screen capture the user shows, the AMP header shows the link icon in the upper right corner, and when you click it it should show the real URL and let you navigate through (but that's not happening, hence the bug).<p>However, in <i>my</i> experience the header is totally different. There is an (i) icon in the upper left corner that shows the link when tapped, and the upper right corner shows the share icon and tapping it opens the share dialog. Note this changed for me recently (I used to get the link icon like the poster).<p>So Google is clearly testing different behavior, which probably led to the bug. In any case, I'd note the version I got that I think the (i) is much less clear than the link icon, and I'm sure the end result is people clicking through to the source site less often. Fuck Google and their aggressive attempts to hijack the web even more than they already have.
So many people in this thread complain about AMP being forced on them as an end user. Nobody forces you to use Google...<p>Just use another search engine like DuckDuckGo. It is sufficient for over 90% of my searches and I haven’t seen an amp page in ages.<p>AMP for SEO is another discussion, in that case it is kind of forced on you if you want to rank high on the Googlenet.
First of all, I'm not a web developer, so I may not get all the problems with AMP.<p>I actually love AMP on mobile. Every site I've used(1) that has an AMP version loads faster and works better even with some ads than the normal version on Firefox mobile with uBlock Origin. Given that it's possible for people to host their own AMP cache (like Cloudflare does), I really don't see the problem with AMP itself.<p>(1) Other then Reddit, but considering how much of a dumpster fire their normal mobile site is I honestly think that it's broken on purpose to try and make people use the app.
The AMP links to visit the original site are working fine for me on Brave (based on Chromium) on Android: clicking on the "(i)" icon shows the URL.<p>The easiest way to to get rid of all AMP pages in Google search results is to disable javascript on www.google.com/*.
Chromium on mobile has always had issues with AMP for me, I've just come to acept it
I think it's wrong for a monopoly to take control of what another entitys site looks like. It's a we can take care of EVERYBODY feature: we were fine without it and will be fine when it doesn't exist anymore
Try this <a href="https://phys.org/news/2019-06-mass-anomaly-moon-largest-crater.html" rel="nofollow">https://phys.org/news/2019-06-mass-anomaly-moon-largest-crat...</a> on iOS safari. The source link does not open.
Google's power abuse with AMP is really upsetting. Hopefully this is being looked into and AMP canned before its spread via monopoly is irreversible. It's bad for all, but Google.