> What's in a URL? On the web, a lot - URLs and origins represent, to some extent, trust and ownership of content. When you're reading a New York Times article, a quick glimpse at the URL gives you a level of trust that what you're reading represents the voice of the New York Times. Attribution, brand, and ownership are clear.
> the recent launch of AMP in Google Search [has] blurred this line
> Google AMP Viewer URL: The document displayed in an AMP viewer (e.g., when rendered on the search result page). https://www.google.com/amp/www.example.com/amp.doc.html
Google has inserted itself in the URL. Copy and paste that, submit it to reddit or Hacker News, or just read it to a friend, and what do you get? A connection to Google.
1: https://developers.googleblog.com/2017/02/whats-in-amp-url.h...
You can't even make the argument that AMP degrades privacy, because regardless of whether you click an AMP link or a non-AMP link in the search results, in both cases many search engines will ping back or use a redirect through a search engine-controlled domain, so they will be aware of the URL you click anyway, AMP or non-AMP.
I guess you're making a minor technical point, and it's technically correct. Someone else could do AMP better. But until someone does, why not shorten "Google's implementation of AMP" to simply "AMP"? Is there any other?
I agree that there is a UX problem to solve (the address bar should show the original URL, copying it should preserve the original URL, etc) but whether the webpage got loaded from the original site or from some AMP cache is irrelevant.
It looks like Bing has the same problem, and serves AMP from bing-amp.com.
Perhaps not, but as a regular web user, I care a lot about this.
I also want to avoid AMP pages themselves, and the URL is the easiest way to see if I've hit one or not.
Why? AMP is roughly speaking a subset of HTML that's somewhat easier to cache, and nothing more. Ideally it should be possible and encouraged to serve most webpages from a cache, to optimize Internet traffic on the global scale. It should be okay to fetch them from a cache without breaking anything. I don't see why the AMP Cache is hated so much. Publishers shouldn't care whether browsers hit their servers or some third-party cache, as long as they can have proper analytics. And guess what? AMP does provide a way to do proper analytics. You can even send analytics data to an in-house URL: https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-analytics/#send... I think most of the hate against AMP in unjustified. Any search engine could decide to cache AMP content.[1] AMP in and of itself doesn't give search engines "more control" over the web (whatever that means), it just makes the web easier to cache for everyone, all search engines, all end-users.
Edit: [1] not only Google caches it, Bing does it too: https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-Blog/September-2018/Introdu...