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?