
Google fixes a problem with AMP, lets you view and share publisher’s own links - gdeglin
https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/06/google-fixes-a-big-problem-with-amp-now-lets-you-view-and-share-publishers-own-links/
======
awinder
"It also has under development a Web Share API that would allow AMP viewers to
pull the original URL into the native sharing flow on the platform, instead of
the AMP Viewer URL."

Holy Moly, this is a huge amount of rigamarole just to support a degraded
experience that helps ONE company do ONE thing in order to make further lock-
in and profits in ONE way. It's hard to believe that any company would ever
invest this amount of technical effort on a flawed product offering -- unless
of course, it was one company with enough damned vertical integration to make
it possibly worth their while.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _a degraded experience_

I like AMP over publishers' own formats, which I have to put into Reader mode
to make, well, pleasantly readable. I don't like AMP's implications. But I
don't think your rendering is fair.

~~~
andy_ppp
AMP is not the problem - the AMP cache is pure evil and if it wasn't for
Google forcing it on people through their SERPs there would be no reason for
Google to add it or have to work around it...

I want to visit publishers own sites and not weird walled Google land.

~~~
ehsankia
You present no real argument rather than calling it pure evil. It loads fast,
ads and analytics go where they're supposed to, and now the URL issue is
mostly gone too.

For users, it's basically seamless benefit with no draw backs.

For developers, yes it takes effort but a lot of it is done for you, and you
also inherit this huge cache, which you call evil but in reality, costs quite
a lot of money and you're getting for free.

It's easy to call something "evil" and completely dismiss all the huge
benefits of a technology, but I'd like to hear what exactly are the remaining
issue.

The AMP team has done their best to one by one address anything that has come
up.

~~~
manigandham
The complete forking of HTML for primarily google search traffic will do more
harm than good.

HTML is already fast. Google could've used search rankings to factor in site
speed and forced many sites to become much faster in a few months, instead of
now requiring more resources to maintain an alternative version just for them.
Also 90% of the ads on the web are served by Google's own Doubleclick for
Publishers, one of the slowest ad servers available.

~~~
lostboys67
yes good luck with that if you have had to work with any site on the internet
it can be a Sisyphean task to get trivial changes made on many sites.

~~~
manigandham
Search rankings and the resulting traffic are a priority, changes would be
made quickly. AMP pages were rolled out within weeks as well, but all that
time and effort could've been spent on making the universal HTML page much
better.

~~~
lostboys67
Lol you haven't worked with may real sites in the wild around 80% of the ones
I have worked with need the CTO to tell the developers to pull their socks up
or your all on a PIP

~~~
manigandham
What? What are "real sites"? I'm in the adtech industry and know execs and
devs at all the top publishers. Revenue/traffic issues are at the top of the
list. They don't sit around doing nothing all day.

Regardless, resources are always constrained and working on AMP means not
working on the standard (mobile) HTML version.

------
akras14
>However, there has been some misunderstanding about how AMP works. One widely
circulated blog post written back in October claimed Google was stealing
traffic from publishers via its AMP pages.

I am really happy to see this change, as the author of said blog post :)

> But that wasn’t true. Google does display the AMP URL in the search results,
> which serves up the page content from Google’s cache, but the traffic
> remains the publisher’s, and the content is served from the publisher’s
> site.

So which one is it? Does it server content from Google cache or from
publisher's site ;)

Link to the original blog post: [https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-
stealing-your-mobile-...](https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-
your-mobile-traffic/)

~~~
ucaetano
They are confusing two different meanings of traffic: \- Advertising: where is
the user coming from \- Networking: where is the data being served from

So my guess is that people were worried that Google would steal the
advertising traffic and, therefore, revenue.

~~~
freehunter
So if I have AMP on my site and a user clicks an AMP link, does my web server
record a hit? That's what I care about, since I use traffic stats to negotiate
deals with sponsors. I don't run third-party (even Google) ads on my site,
it's all native "sponsored content", so making sure traffic is recording
correctly is pretty important to me.

The first question I hear when I start a conversation about a sponsorship is
"how many hits did you have last month" and the second question is usually
"how many hits do your sponsored posts usually get?". I need to be able to
answer those questions, and prove it too.

~~~
ehsankia
The server itself doesn't (you don't get extra load), but analytics is
forwarded to you. So you can still get the numbers you need to convince the
higher ups, just not directly from your server logs.

~~~
epistasis
At first my distaste for AMP has been as a user: broken inertial scrolling,
wasted space, and broken links.

But as I learn about it AMP becomes even more distasteful. Waiting for an
intermediary to forward analytics to you is horrific.

What's going on at Google these days? Everything about AMP sounds like a bald-
faced attempt to destroy the web. At every point there are horribly
unjustified architectural decisions that hurt the web but also help Google.

~~~
wmf
The decisions are justified (although years late) but you either didn't read
them or don't agree with them.

------
macandcheese
So, I still need to take an extra step to view the original link and then
click again to visit it. Why not just make the entire top banner a clickable
link to the source article? My browser already shows the title of the page
separately.

The whole AMP / SERP interaction is such a headache. They already insist on us
having structured page content to source previews from, the last thing I want
to do is write more quasi-semantic markup that just repeats what my original
source code already states. Get out of my way Google.

~~~
wmf
Why do you want to visit the original page? It looks the same or worse than
the AMP version that already loaded.

~~~
chickenfries
To share the original link, to read more posts by the author, to visit the
publication's home page to see what else they publish, to use their comments
section which is not yet supported by AMP...

~~~
ehsankia
Do you share links before visiting the article? With this change, it seems
like sharing the link will be the same amount of clicks.

Same goes for reading more about the author. How often do you do that, and do
you do it before you even read the article?

For visiting the homepage, almost every AMP page I go to these days as a big
logo at the top linking to their (real) homepage, so there's 0 difference for
the user.

The only valid one is comment section. I just tried a few articles, and they
seem to have a button which redirects to the real website. I think that's a
fair compromise. Honestly most article sites do this anyway, load the comments
after a click.

~~~
acdha
> Do you share links before visiting the article? With this change, it seems
> like sharing the link will be the same amount of clicks.

Before today, here's what it looked like:

Real web: 1\. Click on Google search result 2\. Read article 3\. Click share
and get real URL

AMP: 1\. Click on Google search result 2\. Read article 3\. Click share and
realize that you're on an AMP page which is broken for anything other than
mobile web browsers 4\. Either go back to the search results to find the non-
AMP URL or navigate to the publisher's site and use site search find the real
URL 5\. Share the real URL

As of today, Google has made this a little faster but it's still an extra
step: 4\. Click on the small link icon in the header to display the real URL
5\. Share the real URL

That's still considerably worse than the standard web experience. The only
reason anyone is defending this is because it's associated with Google.

------
tyingq
_" One widely circulated blog post written back in October claimed Google was
stealing traffic from publishers via its AMP pages. But that wasn’t true."_

I suspect the writer didn't really look into what the publishers were saying.
AMP shoved a UI element at the top of your content that, when you interact
with it, goes back to Google.

End users already know how to use a back button. So, adding another one,
without being clear about what it was, would certainly create more traffic to
google, and fewer "second pageviews" of your content/site. Google knows that
the top portion of the page is the most valuable.

------
Yokohiii
AMP is really ridiculous. I tried a top article from mobile.nytimes.com via
AMP (google link) and direct link. The AMP version takes more than 3 times
longer to render above the fold with a 3g regular throttling and cold caches,
while the direct link was done in <2s. Chrome doesn't even record enough
frames to show when the above the fold content is visible. With warm caches
the render performance difference is roughly the same. Wasn't AMP ment to help
with that? Superior client side rendering and top notch caching?

~~~
alexbecker
Are you using an adblocker? If so, does the adblocker successfully block ads
for both the AMP and non-AMP page?

~~~
angry-hacker
If you whitelist Google, it does not block ads.

------
maaaats
So basically they just add a button on the already obnoxious banner on top of
the page?

This article also claims that the speedup is partly due to loading the content
in a hidden iframe on the search results page. So it's potentially using more
data in order to be perceived faster?

~~~
cramforce
Only data in the first viewport is loaded during pre-rendering phase.

~~~
catshirt
are you saying that google proxies and loads data based on the screen
resolution of the client? that's actually pretty awesome.

~~~
chinathrow
AMP requires to include some JS and to use the Google AMP cache. Essentially,
your content runs in a web app largely controlled by Google.

------
amelius
Let me introduce CASUVP -- Cooperatively Ad-stripped universally viewable
pages. It's a concept, there's no implementation yet.

Basically, it's a version of the web where users cooperatively clean up web
pages from ads and other unwanted material (e.g. scrollbar-hijacking, user-
tracking), so that only the plain text with minimal markup of the article, and
images remain.

The cleaned-up pages are distributed by torrent or by IPFS, and there is a
consensus algorithm to make sure that pages are not tampered with (e.g. by
content distributors).

Browser plugins help users view and seed the material.

Now if only people pick up this idea and implement it...

------
the_mitsuhiko
Nothing really changes. The URL in the bar is still from the cache.

~~~
chickenfries
Exactly, all they did was add a link underneath the "..." menu to see the
canonical URL. Apparently, the whole justification for the Cache is that
smaller websites don't have CDNs or developer resources or something?

> For a small site, however, that doesn't manage its own DNS entries, doesn't
> have engineering resources to push content through complicated APIs, or
> can't pay for content delivery networks, a lot of these technologies are
> inaccessible.

[https://developers.googleblog.com/2017/02/whats-in-amp-
url.h...](https://developers.googleblog.com/2017/02/whats-in-amp-url.html)

However, I work for a publisher that delivers almost all our assets through a
CDN, over https, etc... we don't really need our pages to be served through
the AMP Cache, we could support users visiting the AMP version of our articles
on our site, and hopefully get more second-page visits. I don't get it, who is
AMP really for, big publishers or small publishers? If I am already a
performance-minded developer, I don't need any of the things AMP provides, but
I am forced to implement it for the magic google juice.

~~~
ucaetano
> I don't get it, who is AMP really for, big publishers or small publishers?

For the users. When looking at search results on mobile I usually go for the
AMP ones, regular results take way too long to load.

~~~
Aaargh20318
Really ? I avoid them like the plague. I switched to DDG just to be rid of
them. I want the full webpage, not some gimped mobile version.

~~~
ucaetano
And if most users are like you, I'm sure Google's internal metrics will show
that and they will discontinue the format.

But I'd be willing to bet that most users are like me, but I have no data
besides the fact the Google seems to be doubling down on it.

~~~
quickben
Most users started to AdBlock. That's why amp is there. Everything else is
people falling for propaganda explanations.

~~~
notatoad
There's nothing preventing adblock from working on amp pages. Amp is currently
a mobile only thing, and most users on mobile are not blocking ads.

I don't know where this myth comes from that amp is all about blocking
adblockers: amp pages require a markup that specifically tags ads as ads and
prevents running scripts after page load. The only two adblock-defeating
techniques are to disguise your ads as content, and re-insert them after page
load, both of which are rendered impossible by the amp spec.

~~~
shinratdr
> Amp is currently a mobile only thing, and most users on mobile are not
> blocking ads.

Most users anywhere are not blocking ads, adblocking by its nature as a non-
default option and something you have to know how to do will most likely never
be the thing that "most users do".

However, the idea that people on mobile do not block ads is just false:
[https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/](https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/)

Worldwide, there are almost 150m more mobile adblock users than desktop
adblock users. The trend of only blocking ads on your desktop is largely a
North American phenomenon.

I can't speak to whether or not AMP is designed to try and stem this tide or
not, but I can say without a doubt that mobile adblock is exploding,
especially when considering the worldwide market, and that publishers are
probably very nervous about this.

------
jannyfer
I like the TechCrunch title better ("Google fixes a big problem with AMP").
"Google fixes problem with AMP" makes it sound like there's only one problem
with AMP.

------
fluxem
AMP was so annoying, I had to switch to Bind on my smartphone, despite
inferior results.

AMP header takes 10% of screen and it doesn't disappear when you scroll down

No comments section on AMP versions or on Reddit comments are not expendable

Hard to get real URL to bookmark or share

Request desktop option is completely broken on news.google.com

------
kyrra
Seems like it may be better to link to the Google blog post on this?

[https://developers.googleblog.com/2017/02/whats-in-amp-
url.h...](https://developers.googleblog.com/2017/02/whats-in-amp-url.html)

------
kuschku
This entire AMP project is already workaround after workaround, but this gets
even worse.

All that would have been required to solve these problems would have been a
simple standard for lightweight pages that anyone could implement, and a
better ranking for any complying page.

Google could offer the cache optionally, or sites could do their own stuff.

Then, the entire rendering and preload problems could have been improved with
a simple JS api to allow for exactly that.

Then none of the rest would have had to be solved, we’d get none of Google’s
increased dominance over the web, and we wouldn’t have to put up with
thousands of AMP pages loading slower than normal pages (because they bundle
fucktons of useless JS) for the sake of improving the loadtimes of a handful
of sites.

~~~
Ajedi32
> All that would have been required to solve these problems would have been a
> simple standard for lightweight pages that anyone could implement

FWIW that's exactly what AMP is. It's not a W3C standard, but a standard
nonetheless:
[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/create/basic_mar...](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/create/basic_markup)

~~~
callahad
AMP is not a standard. It is a Google product with developer documentation,
but that documentation does not make it a standard any moreso that Twitter
having an API makes _it_ a standard.

AMP allows your websites to rank better / more prominently within Google and
Bing, but it comes at the cost of ceding control of markup itself to Google. A
truly open standard would not have hard dependencies on a single for-profit
corporation.

------
qwrusz
I would love to know what is really going on here.

I'm admittedly not very technical, but like a prisoner scratching tally marks
on the wall each day, I try to keep up on the latest "how tech companies are
fucking us over" news of the moment, even though I can't do anything about it.

Google is pushing AMP on pages in their search results today. Fine,
implemented it like idiots. Happens.

But I would not be surprised if in the near future Google comes out with "AMS"
"Accelerated Mobile Sites", and forces entire websites into this madness.

I get it, "fast, efficient" is always the story. Monopolistic nerves, quasi-
TLA control fetishes, and an old-fashioned internet land-grab is the rumor.
But that is too simple for this much trouble and expense. A few years ago
Google was dealing with SPDY, QUIC, HTTP2, and talking about "fast, efficient"
but you know something felt fishy there too and there was a back-room-dealy
vibe with more to the story.

Anywho, while I would love to know what's going on and I have some guesses, I
don't really care anymore. Google is wasting everyone's time with these games.
So...

Why doesn;t Google just get on with it and host the entire internet? [1]

For free.

Please correct me but Google is already cacheing the internet.

Offering to just host the world will allow them to implement whatever bullshit
protocols they were going to do anyway. It would kill off most competitor risk
from AWS and whatever Microsoft came out with 9 years late. They can afford
it. And they have the space (yottabtye my ass).

That's it Google. Just bend us over and host the internet.

[1] ok not the entire internet, 99% of it. Doubt they would host the porn for
free.

------
saycheese
All AMP needs to do is add an "X" to the top right corner and if it's clicked
ask the user if they want to opt-out of AMP.

Either way, the user get sent to the "native" version of the URL they
requested when they click the URL.

------
technion
AMP's v0 is 188K of JavaScript.

Google's standard analytics.js is currently 28K. If you're running AMP, the
AMP compliant version of the same thing, is 64K. Neither of these block
rendering and both of these run largely in the background, yet making it AMP
compliant more than doubles whatever code it requires.

AMP will make progress when I can use it without actually introducing bloat.

------
mrcactu5
as an end-user, I was suspicious of AMP because it changed the websites
slightly and didn't let me share the URL.

now I see there are legal (intellectual property) reasons why that is wrong as
well.

------
aruggirello
tl;dr: it took a little more than _two decades_ to give us the incredible
power of HTML5, CSS3 and modern JavaScript; it took countless hours for the
W3C to define the standards, and years of browser wars to get this far with
compliance. But Google wants us to abandon them in favor of its thing
(because, you know, some websites actually suck). Now, _fixed_...

------
tdkl
In other news, mobile Chrome 57 Beta on Android brought ability to change
search engines as you visit appropriate sites (same as on desktop).

Switched to Duckduckgo.

------
jzl
Ha! I complained about this exact problem here a month ago. I'm taking full
credit. :)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13386243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13386243)

~~~
cramforce
Thanks for the feedback! I did, however, announce this change 2 months ago :)
[https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/794585395056939009](https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/794585395056939009)

------
acqq
Even the famous Podesta e-mail hack was made possible thanks to the... Google
AMP page server policies!

See the picture(1) here:

[https://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-
images/contentim...](https://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-
images/contentimage/38680/1476913065736588.png)

Unless you knew that google.com made their main domain redirect to anything(!)
to provide amp, you'd really believe that the click was going to end up on the
google.com servers, the place where your login data for Google services really
is. Instead, google.com was used as the least expected redirector of them all.

It was known among the security people:

[http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2016/Apr/70](http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2016/Apr/70)

But google at that time kept it being a fully invisible redirector. Their
explanation then: they "do not consider open redirects to be a security
issue." They also wrote: "we generally hold that a small number of properly
monitored redirectors offers fairly clear benefits and poses very little
practical risk." Benefits for whom but Google? And what was proper then in
this Podesta redirect?

It seems they now finally changed the handling of the redirection, adding "The
previous page is sending you to ..." instead of doing it invisibly. It took
the Podesta e-mail hack, possibly changing who's gotten to be a US president,
and some time to go by for them to add that change.

That's the untold story of who, how, and for which goals influenced the
election (Google, Amp, as the unexpected effect of the profit goals of
spreading amp as much as possible).

Apparently the aide of Podesta later claimed to have made a typo: "When the
phishing email first arrived, Podesta referred it to a number of aides. An
aide named Charles Delavan replied, “This is a legitimate email"" "Delavan
says he had meant to write “illegitimate email,” and simply mistyped." Or
maybe it really looked legitimate to him at that moment: the server behind the
link was obviously google.com. Who didn't carefully follow what Google did
with amp couldn't possibly guess that the main google.com domain just became
an invisible redirector thanks to amp.

\----

1) The picture is from the following article:

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-hackers-
broke...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-hackers-broke-into-
john-podesta-and-colin-powells-gmail-accounts)

~~~
xigency
What's also amazing is that this specific Google vulnerability was disclosed
to Google and discussed on this website before that leak.

~~~
acqq
I know that as I saw the link and "parsed it" in my head I've concluded "but
it _obviously_ goes to google.com", the real place where also I log myself in.
Later, I couldn't have believed my eyes as I've typed such an address in the
browser and ended elsewhere, wherever, I had to use curl to convince me that,
yes, google.com/amp just invisibly redirected to the site and the page of the
rest of the url, whatever the rest was.

------
ComodoHacker
“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.”

Oh, Google suddenly acknowledges the value of real URL for the user...

------
rewrew
Publishers just need to not opt-in to AMP. There's really no benefit for them
anyhow.

~~~
TD-Linux
AMP pages are prioritized in search results.

------
liveoneggs
ios scrolling seems a little better now, but maybe I'm just getting used to
it?

~~~
cramforce
WebKit bug to follow on scrolling inertia being different for overflowed
elements from the main scroller
[https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162499](https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162499)

------
malikNF
best way to fix amp is to........ get rid of it. Stupid annoying feature,
couldn't figure out an easy way to disable it, now I am using duckduckgo.

------
frik
How hard is to build a simple HTML5 website with little CSS3 and little to no
(vanilla) Javascript. You know a website can be very tiny and fast. Yet people
who don't know need Google to market them AMP "technology" to do the same but
lock them in, and get full access to analytics data.

------
LeicaLatte
I don't see AMP making it. The invasiveness is classic Google. Up there with
Google Plus.

------
homero
AMP needs to die

------
wyager
AMP is literally the most user-unfriendly thing I have seen on the internet in
years. It's like an exaggerated example of an aggressively awful UX
antipattern.

It's what finally caused me to switch to DuckDuckGo on my phone. Sucks that
the results aren't nearly as topical as Google's for most searches.

