It's one more step along Google's path to eating the internet. Google-served content discovered through Google search rendered in Google's browser running on Google's operating system on a Google-manufactured device connected through Google's ISP and Google's network protocol (QUIC). Vertical integration.

You know the cool thing about this integration ? Any part can be replaced. Some instantly, some take more time because they involve physical stuff. People use the Google integration because it's there by default, not because they are locked-in.

At the moment yes you are right, but if we want it to stay that way we need to do something about it now. I agree that people mainly use Google because it's the default, but if we aren't careful there won't be an alternative left that can stand up against them. The only hope we'll have then is that Facebook, Apple, Amazon or Microsoft decide to tackle Google head on, but in most cases where that has happened in the past Google has won.

I'd already say that in terms of publishing online that Google is the only search engine publishers/marketers care about.

With search, we already approaching that point.

No other search engine comes close to the quality of Google, at least for certain topics.

Outside of Russia, China, Japan and some other countries Google is the dominant search with a big lead.

And that is troubling indeed! Competition is good. And necessary for a healthy market.

It also means that Google has a huge amount of control over what information can be discovered.

What if MS decides Bing isn't worth their while anymore in 5 years? Yahoo will have dwindled away by then, leaving only Google. In Europe, Google has +90% everywhere (except Russia).

And that's the point: quality. Altavista was a good search engine at it's time and now it's just memories. Because a "better" search engine appeared, giving results that were more useful.

If we continue down that road as you worry, at some point regulatory action might be appropriate. Google already seems to be breaking itself up via Alphabet, maybe they should just be cleaved entirely to avoid collusion and encourage competitors. On the other hand, the gov't avoided breaking up Microsoft back in the day, and this seems to have worked out OK as competitors sprung up into the gap the gov't wedged open anyway.

Bing is still using Google as its backend.

www.yandex.com is a really good alternative, I found it even offers better search results for most topic I look at.

Bing doesn't use Google as its back end ... I don't believe it ever did.

Yahoo did switch to using Bing as its back end, some years ago.

Not that I agree with your parent comment that bing still uses google results on the backend, they did at least used to: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses...

Between Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, who do you want to be the overlords of the web? Each one of them is trying to win total dominance and eventually one will. Google seem like they would be the least evil of the five.

The things is, this is exactly whagt their marketing department has been pushing us to believe since their inception.

The motto, the glibly pedantic color schema, the focus on simplicity on their home site, and cleanly (yet viciously) integrated ad revenue, even the language of the letter in the original link, all of these things point to a naivete that ignores how corrupt the ethos of what Google's central argument is: meritocracy above all else, in other words: down with the dumb, down with the lesser, all hail the perfectly manufactured data stream that contains what seems like childlike wonder, but is instead an amalgam of people's minds. They are sucking the intelligence out of us and selling it back at a markup so high it begs disbelief.

The fact that there is Bing is good, adn Bing's search isn't all that far below Google's in terms of getting good data from the web, but the point is: aren't we forgetting that there was a loooong time when we derived a lot of good data without their services? I find the aggressiveness of Google's ignorance to be quite frightening. I find that they are so far removed from the effects of their casual relationship with owning what happens to the data they are "curating" that it seems anathema to good governance, and governance it is because we are subject to the whims of their algorithm's ability to provide us with data that goes beyond what the mind can handle and handle sanely.

There is a monumental schism between what the web is comprised of and the first page of Google's query results, and that is what I think is at issue. What about all of the rest of the data that we never see? How do we know it's not interesting? How could we ever spend the time to sift through it to make certain we aren't missing data that is far easier to comprehend?

Long post, but a quick example: I program a fair amount. I like C++ for various reasons, but the C++ reference page is dry as the Red Sea after Moses played the downbeat of the 40 year cadence the slaves danced to after raising one too many pyramids.

I would wager that there might be a great C++ reference page out there somewhere that has easy on the eyes detail, a fairly conversational tone and nice examples that aren't at the very end of the page. But, because Google's algorithm (and Bing's, Yahoo's, Duck Duck Go, etc) all get tons of traffic from the cppreference.com page, it or some Stack response is the go to answer for essentially every question for which I need an answer. How is that well crafted page ever going to get the right recognition if everyone is being diverted to the cppreference page? It's like the old trope, we do it that way because that's the way we've always done it. Sometimes this means we drive the speed limit because that's the safest way to drive according the engineers who calculated the road conditions when they were built, but it's a little different in this instance because it's the _quality_ of the road that matters, not merely the velocity we drive that dictates the "goodness" of the experience.

Google (and the other big bots out there) are ignoring the quality in their algorithm(s) and merely settling for popularity as the guiding rubric, and I think we are all too aware of how that mentality can lead to unsalient choices.

They've already made it hard enough to make sure legit email ends up in the inbox of a gmail-recipient, rather than being silently flagged as spam -- that anyone hosting their own mail needs to consider if they need to special-case delivery for gmail recipients (I've considered routing gmail-destinations through authenticated smtp to gmail via a gmail-account - then realized that that was just silly and I feel better when gmail doesn't work -- but I don't depend on delivering my (private) email for revenue). Add to that the fact that google is one of few big email providers that are hard to grey-list (or rather automatically white-list once delivery has started) -- and they've already made a great effort of siloing off one of their arguably most open services.

If you think the megacorp that doesn't do customer support is going to be any easier to dislodge at other levels in the stack, once they manage to squeeze themselves in by undercutting the market, I'm afraid you're hopelessly naive.

Once they start to feel confident in their domination, there's nothing preventing them from going the Microsoft way, i.e.:

1. Introducing incompatibilities, forcing closed standards etc. which block any potential competition.

2. Stop spending as much on product development.

I want to Android as an example to prove otherwise.

While yes, you can install CyanogenMod (without Google Play Services), or others along those lines that remove the "Google" out of Android, it's true value (for most common users) is Google Play Services.

While you can say that you can get apps from apkmirror or F Droid, most apps still won't work without Play Services (case & point - Snapchat)

my entire point being - yes, it's very easy to have alternatives (and their importance can't be ignored), Google services (be it Play, or Gmail or others) are what people are looking for.

And people can just buy an iPhone instead. Windows phone is still chugging along.

Define chugging along. I was under the impression it was broken down at the side of the road and moment away from being abandoned.

Yes, alternatives inside the Android ecosystem are more technically doable than easily doable.

I was more thinking of other operating systems: we are fare from lacking functioning alternatives both on mobile and on desktop.

> You know the cool thing about this integration ? Any part can be replaced.

How do you replace search ? How do you get competitive against mail, youtube without the amount of data google uses to sell ad on them ?

All I hear is a challenge. I'm not a big data engineer, but I would be interested in seeing others take it as a challenge to develop a unique, effective, and open platform that rivals the Google monopoly.

AT & T and Standard Oil were also "challenges" and they weren't toppled by "unique, effective, and open platforms" :)

Yandex is pretty good, they have search and a better mail than gmail, just try it out, you will be surprised. I was.

There was NO ads! You can actually read your email - and NO ads! That is amazing!

The problem is that Google is also very good in lots of areas. This makes the challenge even more difficult.

There are existing alternatives, today, that are profitable. What makes you think it's not possible to use something else ?

There's a part that already can't be replaced while keeping all the others. Google Fi only works with Nexus devices. It could be a lack of OEM interest, but who knows what Google does that might keep it that way.

Google Fi is an MVNO, one that entered into an area with arguably insufficient competition. Regardless of how you might rate the level of competition before Google Fi entered the market, it has definitely added ambitious customer-oriented features.

Its device-dependence exists because it's a unique dual-provider MVNO (Sprint and T-Mobile). This allows them to broker the best deal for the end consumer. But the bar is high -- devices must support dual-SIM, which is rare. Devices without explicit support aren't barred from Google Fi but may not get the full features and you can't get help with those devices if you run into issues.

It actually is now Sprint, T-Mobile, and US Cellular.

or any device that accepts a nano-sim. I know several people who use a google-fi sim in iphones

Absolutely not.

Google is just sending a different type of traffic: "one page traffic", but let's not forget that it is Google that is sending the traffic to AMP pages in the first place, there should be no entitlement on the part of webmasters.

I'm only half sure you're trolling so I will point out for others that lost what I hope was your irony and not naivete: Google only exist because content creators allow their bots to index and display part of the often copyrighted content for Google's own monetary gain, so Google should feel no entitlement on owning anything on the Internet.

They don't feel entitled, they just don't care. Just like they don't care with all illegal content on Youtube. They didn't care when they started hotlinking images in Image Search.

Just like Facebook doesn't care about ripped video's on their platform. They know that publishers won't bite the hand that feeds them. They know that they can use their power as the defacto gateway to the internet as there is no competition and noone powerful enough to stand up to landgrabs like this.

Maybe it's even worse. They don't stop and think about the power and influence they have, because over the years it has become entirely natural to them to just take whatever they want, repackage it and call it their own.

What would Google be able to show it's user if it weren't for this greedy webmasters who poured over their sites to generate content?

What comes first? Hen or egg? Google isn't the internet, the web was there long before Google made things findable. You had to know how and where to look. And yes Google made things back then way better.

Non the less without content on the web a search engine is just blank. Unnecessary imho.

So Google making my content a shared property is something of concern to me. Therefore I am not using AMP.

Well, the hen and the egg came first. The egg (the content) was there and the hen (Yahoo) was already making it all findable.

This matches my own experience using AMP via google search. As a _user_ the experience is excellent but it pushes me toward using content in a very shallow way. If I were a content _publisher_ I would be thinking very carefully about the cost this has on retention.

Ill jump on the top post for now, and recommend everyone to use Yandex Search. Yes that is right. Not duckduckgo, because that one is anyway using Google in its backend.

Yandex is surprisingly good, take some time to try it out, whenever you think "oh shit results" and want to switch back to Google search, remind yourself how often you automatically rephrase your search when you dont find anything on Google either. Rephrase search, try again, you will find better results than what you had with Google.

There is less spam/ads, and you will discover whole new websites, and network of websites, some even foreign sites but in English.

It feels like using Google from 2004.

www.yandex.com and no Im not payed by them.

I don't think DuckDuckGo is using Google.

https://duck.co/help/results/sources

In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.

Oh that is nice, was not the case last time I checked duck.

Still, duckduckgo is an US company, better stay away from those given the history of last decade.

So better go with Yandex, the Russian company?

Potentially, unless you happen to be in Russia... clearly if you live in say, Belgium (or Singapore, or New Zealand, etc.), it's unlikely that any Russian agency that has access to your searches will share that data outside their borders. Of course it's generally your service provider that you have to worry about.

Yes, if there’s multiple international companies competing, that’s better than one (even if it might be morally good) company having a monopoly.

As I understand it, they've never used Google's index.

> It feels like using Google from 2004.

Did they bring back the + operator? I still miss it even if you can use quotes instead...

To be fair, the user coming from a search engine is most likely to want to navigate back to Google than to stay on the page. It might not be benevolent but it is an improvement to the user experience of most people.

That's why we have back buttons, no?

Most (if not all) default browsers on mobile, auto scroll/hide the navigation bar off the display after a few seconds. For most non-techie users this means it's 'gone'. Ergo, they have no back button anymore. I've watched many people just open/shut/open/shut their mobile browser just to get back to previous pages - in many cases even re-searching the same query over and over again.

This is modus operandi for many users, hence why Google inserting a big 'go back to Google' banner at the top, is a bad[1] thing.

--

[1] Or from the standard user point of view, a good thing.

But this is just an iOS thing, right? Android has either a hardware back button, or a software back button that's always shown (except for fullscreen apps, such as Youtube and games).

Software buttons hide when using full screen apps and can be made visible again by a swipe from the bottom.

On Samsung Android the back button (↩) is always on the bottom right of the device (below the screen)

For the browser that is back, and if you opened the page in a new window then back means close it and reveal the previous page.

Maybe not everybody realizes that and uses it. I didn't at first but now it's a happy habit.

Isn't Google in charge of Android? Seems like they could fix the button-hiding there instead of adding an HTML workaround for every AMQP website.

Why? The whole purpose of a search engine is to bring you to the result site, not to search forever.

Because not everyone finds a useful page given their query from the first result they check. I often check between 2-4 results for some queries before I find what I want.

Also, given that it's hiding during scrolling now (or soon, depending on your platform) and you'll supposedly soon have the ability to define your own AMP menu, I think it mostly should calm the GGP's nerves.

Then this is a half-baked solution to the problems caused by making tabbed browsing hard.

On the desktop, I will open a bunch of tabs and close the ones that don't pan out. Not just after a Google search, but after anything resembling a search.

Mobile browsers allow this (though slightly awkwardly), but most mobile apps which display web content don't allow anything like this.

Do you think that it how most people search? (I'm not being sarcastic, I doubt they do but I obviously don't know)

I think it is the way most people who care about trying out multiple hits do it. For everyone else, the back button is good enough.

Given that landscape, what is added by a fat page wrapper that makes it easier to go back to the search engine?

But how much of that is in response to slow load times, and optimizing viewing the results without waiting? If AMP is fast, then whatever portion of the reason to do this was caused by slow loading is significantly reduced.

Also, in regards to your up-thread comment, on mobile browsers I will sometimes use that technique because (but only because it can be slow to wait for multiple to load), but doing so is generally more cumbersome. Hold on link, select to open in new window. If I could just quickly visit each as needed, returning if it wasn't what I was looking for, I would much prefer that (as opposed to on desktop, which while I would like quicker loading, I do still occasionally want to open multiple tabs for results as you suggest). That is, I don't think this is a half-baked solution to a problem caused by making tabbed browsing hard, I think it's a solution that addresses some of the reasons we use tabs in the first place (specifically, to parallelize loading times for possibly slow sites).

The purpose of a modern search engine is to find and deliver the requested information with the best experience possible. That does not always mean handing the user off to someone else.

They read that post and if you're lucky they stop and skim through another one, but that's not the one they came for so it doesn't interests them as much. Same thing when you go to a post through HN. Do you stay on that site or come back to HN?

> This makes it ... much harder to navigate to the publisher that created the page in the first place

What makes it hard? People click on links to navigate around the publisher's web site, and you can still have links in the AMP landing page.

All these navigation elements are secondary, and further down the page. You have a point that if the user wants to, they are free to click any link they want. The fact remains that the top-most, primary navigation element on an AMP page is an "X" that closes you out of the publisher's page to send you back to Google. After that, the second most prominent navigation element invites you to browse other publishers. By design, the publisher's own links must come after these two elements.

Yeah - that's really, really shocking to me. I paid attention to the AMP project early on, felt like I had absorbed its value proposition, and made a mental note to check on it from time to time.

I wasn't expecting the examples of its usage to involve altering the UI on AMP pages!

Is it just part of the blessed AMP WordPress plugin? Or is google actually injecting their own UI into AMP pages by default?

If the latter, that would seem like a power grab. Sure, it's "just a toolbar." And search results and adwords ads are "just links."

> Or is google actually injecting their own UI into AMP pages by default?

Yes. Google doesn’t actually link to AMP articles, but caches them on their own servers, modifies the markup, or removes non-compliant ad networks, and serves that to the actual user.

Oh. Wow.

The web is supposed to be a platform, and AMP is supposed to be an open standard ... but the end result of this is that Google Search will modify your web application with their own navigation UI?

Yikes. I mean, injecting your stuff into other people's web pages is bad when a cable provider uses it for ads. Is it not bad for the web platform if it's google that does it?

Or is it linked to your usage of their CDN, and not something that necessarily comes with being an AMP site? (Ie, google will cache it for you, but first you have to agree to let them inject your page). That wouldn't be so bad, because it'd mean that you could play in the AMP playground without agreeing to Google having their fingers in your users' navigation.

But if AMP means "Google-injected UI" right now, then that just seems bad.

You can have AMP without Google-injected UI, but only if you rename it, or don’t allow Google to index your page at all.

If Google indexes a page with AMP, and returns is at as a search result, it NEVER actually returns the AMP page, but always the modified one from the cache.

Google owns all the Chrome on Image Search too. And that didn't stop them from hotlinking to the images on your server. There's no way Google is backtracking on this because of the content owner's concerns.

Maybe they'll make an exception for Germany and France, where the old image search is still live.

FYI: It's long dead in France.

The extra chrome appears to be displayed in browsers but not in the Google app. On Android it's more natural to search from the app; I don't know what the situation is like on iOS.

I still don't understand why it's mandatory to use the Google CDN, but I probably don't want to know.

According to AMP documentation anybody can build an amp cache. But probably nobody did so yet. Also google will most probably link only their cache from the results. But it seems possible that you could build an AMP CMS that would use the advantages only for you, although I do not see much interest over well written HTML.

I agree. You'd have fast-loading pages - but you can get that by just writing decent HTML. What you likely won't get is Google's preferred handling in search results.

The one upside I see is that Google-moderated AMP pages might push ad networks and library developers to develop less bloaty solutions to stay compliant. Those solutions might make it easier to develop regular non-bloaty pages as well.

I think that it is easier to develop a non bloated page even today. But the problem is that the competition got extremely fierce and the ad networks absurdly data obsessed (without much proof that the targeting works).

I wonder whether we can get to a sane level now. Consumers do not seem to be prioritising sites with less bloat (otherwise there would already be a trend for leaner pages). Those who care probably use ad blockers and aren't the target demographic anyway.

There were some search engines that displayed their results in an iframe rather than by going to the link directly. This was a very bad move and angered users tremendously. It's interesting to see how Google is trying to revive this concept through the backdoor of providing the user with a faster loading page. What with mobile being set to be a larger portion of visitors to websites at some point in the future this makes Google effectively the only real website on their view of the web and the rest of us chickens as information providers to Google, to be terminated at will.

Digg tried the same thing, back when Digg was a thing. It didn't go over well, but they didn't have nearly the same power that Google does.

If you aren't comfortable with it, just don't use it, right? I'm probably missing something, but I don't understand how something can be such a hard pill to swallow when it is opt-in.

AMP content shows up before other organic search results. So it's not really optional unless you want to lose all your search-driven traffic.

I think Google had to do something, publishers overdid it with their crappy websites with 50 tracking links and banner ads. The mobile web was slowly dying and everything was moving to apps. AMP is their effort to reverse that trend somewhat. I haven't heard any better ideas (Facebook Instant Articles is worse imo).

do you realize Google bought and now owns 49 of those 50 tracking systems you mention?

the main goal of amp is to monopolize it further and make that last one they couldn't buy stop working.

Google can rank fast pages better. It's perfectly possible to build fast pages with html, but Google wants to own the Internet.

It's like spying on everyone so we can make world safer.

The guy said AMP doesn't influence ranking. Who do we have to believe ?

it may not be a direct ranking signal but i think this is a little disingenuous. by putting this "lighting" icon next to some results, the CTR (click through rate) on the SERPS (search engine results pages), will likely be higher for AMP pages, and that higher CTR _is_ a direct ranking signal which will eventually lead to better rankings.

that is for organic results, but the AMP news carousel _does_ appear at the top of the search results pages.

It doesn't influence ranking. It shows up at the top in the carousel.

Is there an option to avoid it from an end user's perspective? It's made google news so frustrating for me, it will go back a page in history or slide to the next story for no reason whatsoever. I have a Nexus 6P, use Chrome so there's no reason for it to act like that other than just being shitty.

I kinda just stopped reading Google news rather than try to fix it (:

You could try using the Firefox browser. I haven't seen any AMP pages since I moved to it.

Because those that do not opt in will be implicitly penalized by users trained to prefer AMP pages, whether that preference is warranted or not.

The top navigation, from a search on android, is almost the same between an amp page and a non amp page. The only difference is the text says "from ..." rather than just the site.

it exists for normal web pages and is actually named Chrome.

I wonder if AMP isn't just an open source/mobile friendly version of StumbleUpon. Not sure if anyone remembers those SU banners at the top of most blogs, trying to get more in-site clicks from deep linked articles.

As of now it's not a requirement, so I'm not sure how your hypothetical is relevant.

It is a requirement for certain placement; such as the high ranking top-level news carousel.