Google manipulates your web experience
The reason Google became the most popular search engine, while the likes of Altavista, Excite and Lycos fell by the wayside, was its ability to quickly deliver accurate results. It sourced these from a huge index of pages that it compiled by constantly ‘crawling’ the web. Over the years, however, Google’s focus has shifted from prioritising sites based on the relevance of their content to those that most closely adhere to Google’s own standards.
One example of Google attempting to manipulate the web is its use of accelerated mobile pages (AMP). Introduced in 2015, AMP is a system whereby streamlined versions of web pages are preloaded and delivered to your browser via Google’s servers.
When AMP was first announced, Google said it would help ensure that multimedia content such as videos and animations would load rapidly and behave consistently across desktop and mobile devices. But the system has been criticised for allowing Google to favour AMP links in its search results and use them to show its own ads, as well as forcing web designers to create their sites to Google’s desired specifications or else slip down the search rankings.
Recently, there’s been a backlash against Google’s increasing control over how the web works, and concerns that AMP allows it to track the content we view online. Browser developer Brave (www.brave.com) and privacy-focused search engine Duckduckgo (https:// duckduckgo.com) have both started ‘de-amping’ search results to let users bypass the system and access websites directly rather than viewing their AMP versions.
“AMP encourages more of the web to be served from Google’s servers, under Google’s control and arbitrary non-standards,” said Brave in a blog post (www.snipca. com/41830, see screenshot above right). “AMP is one of many Google strategies to further monopolise the web, and build a web where users serve Google, instead of websites serving users.’’
Google gives no indication that you’re visiting an AMP site rather than the original source, which makes its enforcement of the technology not only self-serving but somewhat sinister, too. Also, as Brave points out, AMP can actually result in pages loading more slowly than other speed-optimisation techniques, so its benefits for web users are negligible.