Dinging AMP after Years of Unknowing: Timely Marketing Perhaps?
April 22, 2022
In one of my Google monographs, I included a diagram showing Google as a digital walled garden. The idea is that a Google user would access the Google version of the Internet via Google. I documented this by referencing some Google patents which few read or bothered to match to Google’s vision for the really big new thing: The mobile Internet.
The Google rolled out AMP with some magic PR dust explaining that speed was good. I laughed. Yep, speed is good, but the shaping of content and funneling those data into, through, and out of the Google was way better. If you look at the world through wonky Google PR sparkles, good for you.
I read “Why Brave and DuckDuckGo are cracking down on Google’s AMP.” The key point in the write up is that these steps have been taken seven years after the AMP roll out and more than 15 years after I wrote The Google Legacy, Google Version 2.0, and Google: The Digital Gutenberg. Speedy for sure.
The write up states with the attendant “wow, this is such a bold move” prose:
Brave published a blog post saying it’s releasing a new feature called De-AMP that’ll redirect you to the publisher’s original page, instead of an AMP-based link. The feature is available in Nightly and Beta versions of the browser, and will be enabled by default in the upcoming 1.38 Desktop and Android versions. The firm said it’s working on porting these functions to its iOS browser at the moment. A day later, privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo posted on Twitter that its apps and extensions will redirect users to publishers’ non-AMP pages when they click on links in search results.
Translation: Avoid the Google version of the Internet. I could offer some examples of how Google reshapes on the fly certain types of content, but I am confident that you, gentle reader, are familiar with this mechanism, right?
Google does many interesting things? There is the quaint notion of quality and Google’s view of quality. There is the significance of time metadata and Google’s version of time in general and time metadata in particular. And more? You bet. But everyone knows these mechanisms, right? Absolutely because most people meet tell me they are search experts.
Net net: This strikes me as marketing.
Stephen E Arnold, April 22, 2022
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