
Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic - akras14
https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile-traffic/
======
AJ007
"I hope I am not being too hard on Google." \-- no, the author is being very,
very nice. Google has a strong business interest in users never going to other
sites. Between AMP & voice search, the future is going to be very rough for
businesses that rely on free search traffic.

In practical business terms I would strongly suggest website owners build
ultra-light versions of their sites. If you have international aspirations
your site should work on Opera Mini. If you have a big audience it is very
reasonable and worth it to have desktop/tablet, smartphone, and ultra-lite
versions of your site.

Reposting part of a comment I made a month back on AMP:

#1 There is a big problem with mobile sites. I'm using a recent iPhone and
many popular news sites, without ad blockers, are as close to unusable as the
worst websites I've ever been to, dating back to using Internet Explorer in
1999. Auto playing inline video ads that slide in to view, just insane. These
things clearly kill time on site and reader retention. I have theories about
why publishers are ignoring this, but who knows.

#2 Google is using AMP to co-opt publisher's traffic. This means users are
scrolling to another story from another publisher or easily bouncing back to
the Google results when they land on your content. (See the X in the story
link on the animated gif example.) There goes your time on site and long term
user retention. If #1 was a problem for you already, you probably don't
notice.

#3 AMP & Instant articles are going to put a stranglehold on third party ad
networks and represent a very real anti-trust issue. There are a bunch of
other privacy implications too, which have been discussed in length.
Publishers should be thinking really hard about their future.

~~~
tboyd47
How do you suggest publishers who are dependent on traffic from Google cope
with AMP in the short-term? It seems like there is no way to compete with AMP-
enabled content on Google ranking except by adopting AMP.

~~~
djsumdog
Stop using amp and find other ways to optimize and minifity their websites for
mobile? Foundation has the ability to include only the components you want if
you build it using SASS and by including/minifiying the individual Javascript
files during your build process.

The more I look at AMP the more I absolutely hate it. This is just another
thing to make me not want to use it.

If Google points to a site, they should serve your site. If they're serving
from cache, put in a DMCA and tell them hands off your content.

~~~
malka
It would be sooo bad if your business suffered a search rank penalty due to
the lack of AMP. It would be a real shame.

------
hannob
AMP is essentially Google's answer to people creating terrible web
experiences. It's been discussed and documented a lot. Common webpages today
load content from dozens of different ad, tracking and whatever hosts, take
several megabytes to load. All well known, but people don't stop doing it.

Now Google comes along and says: You can't do it, let us do it. Which is
perfectly reasonable from their point of view. And when I surf google news on
my slow mobile connection I'm always happy when I see that a link is going to
an amp target - because then I know it'll be loaded fast.

But you don't need Google to do that. If you don't like AMP nobody stops you
from doing the same thing. Limit the amount of stuff you load into your page,
reduce the third party content that you include to a sane number of hosts
(something like 3 instead of 50), optimize your javascript, deploy HTTP/2\.
None of that is magic and you can have your fast webpage without any AMP.

~~~
rebelde
> If you don't like AMP nobody stops you from doing the same thing.

The AMP symbol tells users that the site loads quickly. Google doesn't
indicate the same thing about non-AMP sites that still load quickly. Guess
which site the user will tend to choose. I am not sure AMP will be optional
for sites that want to get chosen.

~~~
AznHisoka
I'm pretty sure non tech users don't even know what AMP is for.

~~~
lmm
They don't have to though. If there's a symbol and sites with that symbol are
faster, they'll learn to look for the symbol, perhaps not even consciously.

~~~
criley2
>They don't have to though. If there's a symbol and sites with that symbol are
faster, they'll learn to look for the symbol, perhaps not even consciously.

Totally disagree. I didn't know what AMP is and I keep seeing it. I avoided it
thinking it was yet-another Google adware property like DoubleClick, another
cleverly named way to trick users.

For the vast majority of users on 4G connections, AMP loads aren't that much
faster (When you download 8MB/sec on 4G, a 2MB page is just not a deal
breaker) and I doubt that very many users at all in America are noticing that
dramatic of difference on their devices, enough to subconsciously learn to
like it.

~~~
philsnow
Bandwidth is often not the limiting factor on mobile networks. AMP reduces the
number of TCP connections your browser has to open (each of which requires 2
RTTs, and many of which will have HTTPS running over them which requires
another one or two RTTs).

Take all those connections and introduce a 1-5% packet loss rate, and suddenly
there's a very good chance that any given "page load" (really dozens of
requests) takes perceptually "forever". That is what AMP helps with.

------
lucaspiller
The whole idea of AMP seems like it's really the wrong way to solve the
problem. If you remove all the third party JavaScript, fonts, large images and
"like" buttons you'll have effectively the same. I guess it already messes up
ads and analytics (although I'd assume Google's services still work), so
what's the problem?

Kind of related: I recently switched my blog from Wordpress to Hugo. I found a
minimal theme, but the amount of junk it was loading was shocking. I created a
stripped down version if anyone is interested:
[https://github.com/lucaspiller/hugo-privacy-cactus-
theme](https://github.com/lucaspiller/hugo-privacy-cactus-theme)

~~~
akerro
In the last 5 years there was NO WORDPRESS THEME OR PLUGIN that I didn't have
to modify. I never saw any WP theme that comes with minified CSS/JS, handles
sidebars correctly - sidebar created after post content, generated by PHP not
JS, generates correct <a> tags, even one "modern" theme had links in sidebar
with "nofollow"... "SEO-friendly" plugins that make blog generation time 3-5
times longer than before, of course JS not minified, jQuery and fonts linked
with ?version=xxxx (prevents server and browser from caching it), social
buttons that were downloading ~1MB of scripts and CSS (for Facebook, Twitter,
G+ and Pinterest).

Whole WP ecosystem is a huge pile of crap, each plugin adds more and more mess
to it. I tried Hugo and Joomla, but they were even worse (Joomla had a few
security issues that developers refuse to fix, Hugo was more bloated than WP).

After trying and modifying over 20 acceptable themes I decided to start
working on my own blogging platform that will be SEO-friendly and clean.

~~~
pmlnr
Agreed on the WP part. At the same time, when you make a WP theme from
scratch, with Twig and without all the crap, your WP becomes surprisingly
fast.

Hugo is a completely different thing, don't compare it to WP.

~~~
askmike
Why not compare Hugo to WP? That is what people do who want to create a new
website.

They take a different angle, but the goal for both is to allow for easy
maintainable websites.

------
jacquesm
I don't (and never will) use AMP and I feel that it is patently unfair to
penalize pages for not using some non-standard tech. Google should index the
web fairly, not make use of their tech a factor. Webpage speed is a fair
measure (and I really wouldn't know what I could do to make my pages any
faster, AMP will not make a measurable difference).

I would expect an un-biased search engine to rate pages with and without AMP
equal and to not show 'badges' based on whether or not a page uses tech by the
same vendor of the search engine.

~~~
piyush_soni
In my opinion, the problem is that your version of unbiased doesn't add much
value to a user (and is actually biased for the website-owners). For example,
SourceForge started adding a lot of misleading 'Download' buttons all over
their page, and they might ask the same thing about 'an unbiased ranking'
(Google's always been criticized for being the 'Web Police'). As a user
however, I'd want Sourceforge's rankings go down the drain because it uses
(directly or through its advertisers, doesn't matter) such a bad practice of
getting users to click on the ads. AMP is similar. They're giving better
ranking to pages which add value to the user, and are probably less concerned
about the webmaster. In countries with slow internet, AMP adds a lot of value.
You click, and the page is there (no waiting icons and 'downloading' for a few
seconds)

(Edit: Sure, Sourceforge was improved a lot after the new owners, it was just
used as an example)

~~~
jacquesm
The best solution to combat bloat is less bloat, not faster ways to deliver
bloat (all that will do is increase the budget for bloat).

~~~
piyush_soni
Why not both?

------
Animats
It's not your site any more. You're just a free content provider to Google
now.

~~~
bjt2n3904
When I heard about AMP, I didn't get warm fuzzies. I didn't exactly know how
or why, but something told me that the main benefactor with this technology
was Google, not the user, and certainly not the content provider.

I can make pages faster without AMP by stripping the needless bloat and using
a proper CDN. Why do I need this tech again, besides the artificial goad of
page rank?

~~~
Ph0X
If you're willing to put in all the work to do it yourself, and also pay for
CDN (though it probably won't be as good as Google's), then feel free to do
it.

But yeah, nothing's free. They give you this great technology, free access to
their world-wide CDN, and better organic search results, at the cost of having
the X button going back to search.

Though I have no idea how the author things that the "X" button should go back
to the home page honestly... You open an article, you close the article. If
you want to go to the homepage, you click the top banner with the logo.

~~~
JBiserkov
>I have no idea how the author thinks that the "X" button should go back to
the home page honestly

He's not suggesting the "X" leads to the _home_ [0] page, but to the actual
"deeplink" page (blogpost, etc).

I'm not the author, but here's my idea:

Normal webpage: click result in Google, page loads (for a long time), I click
reader view, read some, close reader view, explore the site.

AMP page: allows me to skip the loading time & the click on 'reader view' and
start reading directly (so far, so good), but then I close "(AMP) reader view"
and want to explore the site. Instead I am back at square one, exactly where
Google wants me to be.

[0] [https://xkcd.com/869/](https://xkcd.com/869/)

~~~
shostack
You hit the nail on the head. The cost to the publisher is added
discoverablility of their other content and the ad revenue that comes from it
(it also hits networks like Taboola hard).

Their success becomes ever more tied to Google for the next hit.

------
niftich
Wired broke this story [1] in February 2016, soon after Google announced it'd
start directing results to the AMP Cache on the mobile site. In the meta-
writeup the next day, Wired wrote "Google's AMP Is Speeding Up the Web By
Changing How It Works" [2], while noting that this was a necessary step to
compete with Facebook's Instant Articles and Apple's equivalent tech.

[1] [https://www.wired.com/2016/02/google-will-now-favor-pages-
us...](https://www.wired.com/2016/02/google-will-now-favor-pages-use-fast-
loading-tech/)

[2] [https://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web-
chang...](https://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web-changing-
works/)

------
OJFord

        > I was expecting it to cause a redirect to the original
        > article. Instead it redirects back to Google search
        > results. Say What?
    

Well, what it does is exactly what I would expect; if clicking 'X' redirected
to the author's site _I_ would be thoroughly confused.

If I click on a link and it opens in a new tab, I don't close the tab ('X')
expecting to go to the home page - I expect to go back to the page from which
I opened it.

~~~
interpol_p
I agree with your expectation of clicking the 'X' going back to the results.

But it's a bit strange, why have the 'X' there at all when the browser back
button will do exactly the same thing more naturally?

~~~
OJFord
I imagine it's to enhance the feeling that the user just quickly popped
something open over their search results - designing it to make it 'feel' like
a different; faster experience.

~~~
disruptalot
Google wants you back in their serps as fast as possible and for you to notice
that it's an option.

------
dkersten
> _Google was injecting a large toolbar at the top of the snapshot encouraging
> users to get back to Google search results (a functionality already provided
> by the back button)_

I learned, through a series of usability tests my (former) startup ran amongst
its users, that most non-tech people do not click the back button and get very
confused if your pages don't have their own back/forward/close/menu
navigation.

We moved our apps workflow from "use the browsers back button to go back" to
having all navigation including back/close as part of the HTML UI.

~~~
catshirt
i question the validity of your test and/or it's application in the current
context.

what I am hearing is "the average non-technical person incapable of using
Google."

~~~
dkersten
These people weren't incapable of using Google or computers. Some users were
business-types who are used to using a lot of web-based SaaS tools and quite
capable and comfortable using computers.

By non-technical I really meant they weren't developers; they were sales,
marketing and management type people.

When asked, it simply didn't occur to most of them to simply press the back
button.

Now, its not apples to apples, of course, and since this was in a web app
where there may well have been a fear that pressing back would lose the page
like you do in some (badly designed) single page applications, its possible
that this skewed the results somewhat. Either way, we found that adding in-
page navigation improved the workflow for almost everyone.

~~~
catshirt
but how they use your application is not a reflection of how they use the web
at large.

i'm not surprised by your study's result, I'm just not sure you can extend
your conclusion to believe that people won't or can't click the back button to
return to Google after clicking a result.

------
laser
Why would I want to give up 10% of my screen space to a useless bar that when
I try to exit out instead takes me away from the page? Complete UX madness.

~~~
nailer
I've asked @amphtml why they're adding it:
[https://twitter.com/mikemaccana/status/787968936251981824](https://twitter.com/mikemaccana/status/787968936251981824)

~~~
SlashmanX
The URL bar shows "google.com" in a lot of mobile browsers (including the one
in your screenshot), the bar shows the original website this content is from

~~~
ricardobeat
Trying to fix an issue that the AMP system itself introduced.

------
romanovcode
I think that this whole AMP thing is horrible for the web.

It's like Google is not dictating how one should build/style their websites.
Thanks, but no thanks. Stay evil, Google.

~~~
fixermark
Google has an eye on the next billion web users---the ones who aren't on the
network yet because of cost and bandwidth. Their experience will be
significantly bandwidth-constrained in the short run, and AMP is one of the
initiatives to provide a segment of the web that works in such an ecosystem.

If the web were going in a direction to serve that demographic organically,
AMP wouldn't be necessary.

~~~
freehunter
But it's actively making the Internet _worse_ for the current users. Is it
worth destroying the current user base in order to attract a new one?

~~~
fixermark
How is it making the Internet worse for current users?

~~~
romanovcode
Well do you really like the idea that when you go to some search result it
effectively is opening an iframe to the website you're trying to go?

Or as a web developer you need to make sure to adopt to their stupid standards
like renaming your img to amp-img and making sure it works in amp __and __non-
amp so you 'd be doing both?

I see it as complete bollocks.

~~~
fixermark
> Do you really like the idea that when you go to some search result it
> effectively is opening an iframe to the website you're trying to go?

As an end-user or web developer?

As an end-user, I do not care. In fact, it seems that the AMP solution (which
isn't an iframe so much as just serving the data from Google's cache at a
Google URL) is faster.

> Or as a web developer you need to make sure to adopt to their stupid
> standards like renaming your img to amp-img and making sure it works in amp
> and non-amp so you'd be doing both?

As a developer, if I care enough about my user's experience to be bothering
with AMP in the first place, I should be using a toolchain that makes it
pretty straightforward to go from my meta-representation of my content to the
render target (HTML / css, etc.). Because that toolchain should already be
doing things like precompiling my CSS, condensing my image data, etc.

------
Aissen
Actually having the site served from the same, already-open, probably pre-
fetched connection, already open browser is great for the user.

It even has the advantage of loading inside the Google App, where no
adblocking exists, so it might even be good for publishers.

Yes, there's no discovery if you don't design for that, user will just bounce.

~~~
josho
> having the site served from the same, already-open, probably pre-fetched
> connection

So, the bottleneck is really the connection setup time? Seems to me, that
http2 largely solves that problem, while html already supports prefetch.

Don't kid yourself, the goal here is a better web _locked into the google
ecosystem_.

~~~
Aissen
http2+quic+proper support in the browser can probably help you here. The thing
is all of this is available today inside the google{, news} app.

It might be locking you in the Google ecosystem, but the project is open
source, and if there wasn't a monopoly in search/ads it wouldn't be an issue…

------
pmontra
> Consider adding a link at the top of your AMP page, giving user an option to
> visit the original post

Why should they want to read the post again? The only viable option is to have
links to other posts on your site, or maybe a link to the comments.

By the way, what's the purpose of the bar at the top? The back button of the
browser already does that, even on mobile.

About analytics: I don't know if those accesses don't show on Google Analytics
(I really don't) but what if one uses Piwik? Is there any way to get a report
of the access?

~~~
Illniyar
"By the way, what's the purpose of the bar at the top? The back button of the
browser already does that, even on mobile."

It has a slide-out animation to it?

~~~
pmontra
I assume it's an effect that plays when one taps the back arrow in the bar.
I'm using Opera on my phone, no animation there, so I can only guess.

The are page transitions. Considering that Google controls both the source and
destination page I'm sure they can make one without stealing space on screen.
That annoys the user more than the owner of the content.

And if the user has a browser that doesn't support page transitions, it's only
a waste of screen space.

------
andrewaylett
This feels much more like FB's "instant articles" than what I actually want
(as a user) from my web pages.

------
wtbob
I still can't get over the fact that AMP breaks the img tag and requires
JavaScript.

My long-running browsers instances are bogged down by JavaScript (and I have
NoScript on whitelist mode, with it only allowed where necessary!). Requiring
it on any fast-page standard seems counterproductive.

And why, _why_ would they break the img tag‽

~~~
bitmapbrother
AMP doesn't "break" the img tag. It's more optimal to use the amp-img tag for
AMP pages, but if you use img instead it's not going to break your page.

>And why, why would they break the img tag‽

[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/amp_replacements](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/amp_replacements)

~~~
josho
As far as I can tell the amp-img tag doesn't add anything that img doesn't
already support. The page simply mentions some vague statement about needing
to understand the page layout, but uses the same attributes as img.

~~~
bitmapbrother
Did you click the support first-viewport preloading link?

------
Mikho
AMP in general is rather gimmick and scam. Just normal regular HTML stripped
from third party tracking JS--dozen of megabytes--provides pages of the same
size. It's only a matter of clean code to make a page mobile friendly.

Introducing yet another additional markup format to serve mobile sites with
the only purpose for Google to compete better with Facebook is excessive and
additional dev overhead. But it favours Google's interests and Google
basically blackmails content providers locking search availability to only
those who obey. And additionally it gives Google excuse to serve pages via own
domain with backlinking.

There should be just common practices for mobile code simplicity and not
another new markup.

~~~
kilroy123
I wish they would kill it, personally. It makes sites feel and act weird
different.

------
shortformblog
I get that this is frustrating, but this is exactly what Google said it would
do. You can still track your traffic through analytics (per my GA setup, it
shows the regular domain's AMP page, rather than Google's site), and you can
still run ads against it if that's what you would like to do.

It's not so much a shock as it is a "new normal." Whether you like that new
normal, that's up to you.

(For what it's worth, AMP causes a significant bump to my bounce rate, made up
by the higher number of visits that come in via users looking for the AMP
symbol.)

------
visarga
Well, considering that said traffic originated from Google, and that Google
was under no obligation to send it to OP's page, it's a little more nuanced
than "stealing". It just means they sent different behaving traffic than usual
- traffic that only touches one article and returns to Google.

It might discourage webmasters from adopting AMP though, if they have the
expectation to lead the visitor to the homepage or other articles.

~~~
pcl
I really love the speed of AMP pages, but I don't like the fact that the
server request is proxied through Google.

This is akin to an ISP injecting their own little optimization toolbar into
pages rendered to the user, except that cert pinning isn't even an option
here, since Google is doing the content re-writing at the app tier. They even
manage to keep the browser security icon green, creating the at-a-glance
perception that the data provenance can be trusted!

If Google edge caching really is critical, then I'd rather see an architecture
in which the AMP content is signed by the originating site, and the signature
is looked up and validated client-side. This might incur a bit more of a
performance hit for sites that are being overwhelmed, but really, that's as it
should be -- as an end user, it's surprising that my AMP results are
essentially a Google cache. And it would seem that Google goes to good lengths
to make the look-and-feel appear browser-like, instead of calling out the
cached nature of the response.

~~~
IanCal
> And it would seem that Google goes to good lengths to make the look-and-feel
> appear browser-like, instead of calling out the cached nature of the
> response.

Why would a cached website be shown looking different from a non-cached one?

~~~
pcl
The fact that it's being served out of Google's servers changes the trust
model for the content. End users have no good reason to trust Google with the
cached data, but people assign trust to them when they click an AMP link.
There's no real indication to an end user that that data is coming out of
Google's caches rather than from the content provider. I find that misleading.

Typically, cached web pages come out of edge caches, either maintained by a
CDN selected by the content provider, an end-user's ISP, or by a box on the
local network. In this case, _Google_ \-- the search engine -- is
fundamentally changing the nature of how the user obtains the third-party
search result content.

IMO this is very different than my company or ISP doing some edge caching.
It's different because it is much more of an opt-in sort of relationship, and,
more importantly, because it's decentralized -- if Comcast starts to muck with
search result content, Verizon users will notice the discrepancy. If Google
takes advantage of their monopoly position and alters AMP content, nobody
except the content providers will be the wiser.

~~~
fixermark
> End users have no good reason to trust Google with the cached data

I'd imagine that end users who don't trust Google aren't using Google.

> There's no real indication to an end user that that data is coming out of
> Google's caches rather than from the content provider.

Users who care can see the URL and the domain for which the cert is signed.
Most users do not care.

> IMO this is very different than my company or ISP doing some edge caching.
> It's different because it is much more of an opt-in sort of relationship...

I don't see why I can't substitute "Google" and "Bing" for "Comcast" and
"Verizon" in your example.

For that matter, at least in the U.S., it's a lot easier to switch out my
search engine than my ISP if Comcast starts to muck with result content. FWIW,
Verizon already redirects failures of domain name resolution to itself. I
don't like it, and there's not much I can do about it if I want Internet
around here.

> If Google takes advantage of their monopoly position and alters AMP content,
> nobody except the content providers will be the wiser.

That's a fair concern, but the day Google does that is the day a media
firestorm blows AMP out of the water as a trustworthy tool.

~~~
IanCal
> That's a fair concern, but the day Google does that is the day a media
> firestorm blows AMP out of the water as a trustworthy tool.

And in particular, it looks (at a quick check) like the google hosted files
are in a very predictable location, so it should be easy to write something to
check both that version and the hosted version against each other to monitor
for discrepancies.

------
manigandham
AMP is a terrible format and makes 0 progress for the open web.

HTML is already fast, it's all the extra resources added that makes pages
slow. For publishers, the reason sites are slow is a combination of ad revenue
pressure, poor tech skills, lack of time and focus on other priorities like
producing content in a saturated market. This is changing slowly so that UX is
more important but creating an entirely new proprietary system that only takes
time away from the main site (and just affects mobile) is not the right
answer.

More interestingly, the #1 most used adserver on the planet is Google's own
DoubleClick - which means they could singlehandedly make all sites (desktop +
mobile) faster by implementing better tech in their own stack.

------
yoz-y
Hm. The x button he mentions is only visible if you got to the page from
Google search. If you follow the direct link to the amp page then the header
just mentions his original URL as the browser (mobile safari). I would say
that such behaviour is quite consistent with mobile so... whatever.

~~~
elsewhen
can you imagine if every site that linked to yours had a bar at the top of
your page that said "back to facebook" or "back to wikipedia"? mobile web
users know how to use the back button but google is taking up your screen
real-estate to drive traffic back to google.

this reminds me of sites in the early web that used to link out to sites and
frame them with a banner at the top. websites countered this with frame-
breaker scripts -- but publishers really shouldn't have to do that.

~~~
buro9
> can you imagine if every site that linked to yours had a bar at the top of
> your page that said "back to facebook" or "back to wikipedia"?

I saw a site do this yesterday. It was so noticeable because I only permit
same-origin JavaScript and the whole site broke (most actually work).

Then I realised there is an intermediary providing this service:

[http://linkis.com/](http://linkis.com/)

It is the worst of all things.

~~~
gondo
you can detect if your page is running inside iframe and if so, make the
browser to load only your page, to get rid of services such as linkis.com

~~~
Tepix
but does this work with AMP pages that restrict the javascript?

~~~
buro9
AMP is "HTML with some restrictions".

Speaks nothing of HTTP (otherwise they could've done the right thing and added
a "text/html;amp=1" content-type).

In theory this should still work: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/X-...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/X-Frame-Options)

But I doubt that Google's AMP cache will respect existing headers (the very
nature of the cache stuff means that they won't, but what they will do to non-
cache headers on an item is undefined AFAIK and so they will probably just
strip them).

~~~
magicalist
a quick look at an amp page (from google's cache) shows it's being served with
x-frame-options:SAMEORIGIN, so looks like the linkis thing won't work with
them.

------
tonmoy
The fact that you can not go to the original page from the AMP page bothers me
so much. I go as far as avoid AMP pages altogether just because of that
reason.

------
SimeVidas
Aren’t you supposed to put links to your other articles at the bottom of that
AMP page? I mean, that seems like the best way to get users to visit your full
site.

------
akras14
A tech lead from Google wrote his response, if anybody is interested:

[https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-
mobile-...](https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile-
traffic/#comment-55336)

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Pxtl
I assume Google ads that are served through AMP will still count. In that
case, you can think of AMP as a high-speed static host where you still get
paid even though you didn't pay for hosting. But I agree it's very surprising
behavior to the actual owner of the website.

The usability downside of providing a link to the actual webpage should be
obvious - Google is trying to pretend this _is_ the actual webpage. Why would
they want a redundant link just to confuse the users?

That said, ever since Android separated google results view from chrome and
added that strange "x->back" button thing I keep getting tripped up from a
usability perspective. That's more the Android team being silly again, not
just AMP, I think.

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buckbova
> Explore the site further OR hit the back button to go back to Google search
> results

I set Google to open links in a new tab anyway so the X the OP is complaining
about is actually exactly my browsing style to click X and go back to search
results.

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ggggtez
Why doesn't the author just measure how much money they are making? They seem
to think some things are bad (header bar, etc) but as far as I can tell they
could find out very easily if using AMP is helping or hurting.

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remremz
I work for several large newspaper publishers. We have been getting pushed to
get all of our content optimized for the AMP experience as to not get left
behind. As stated by others though this is good for the end consumer, not so
much for the newspaper industry itself.

One of the biggest gripes is getting our paywall model onto the AMP sites, as
we have very little input as to how that is done. It also takes ages to hear
back about requests/suggestions with little feedback as to why they think its
a bad idea.

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brainfire
The web is not your personal money generator. It's a place I go for
information. I'm sorry that your fellow developers have made it such a user-
hostile place that projects like AMP that defend the user experience make it
harder for you to make money. But maybe if you're only interested in
publishing for the money, I'm not particularly interested in courting your
continued participation.

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cramforce
Posting my comment from the article here:

Hey, this is Malte and I am the tech lead of the AMP Project for Google. While
I work on the AMP open source project, I did check back with the Google Search
team that is more directly responsible for most of the points mentioned in the
post. I personally find it very important to respond, because “stealing
traffic” is literally the opposite of what AMP is for. The original idea
behind AMP was to allow content to be distributed to platforms (such as
Google, Twitter and Pinterest) in a way that retains branding and monetization
control for the publisher. AMP traffic is the publisher’s traffic. Period.

I also realize that “just turning on the WordPress plugin” doesn’t get you
there. Especially if a WordPress installation is heavily customized, one will
need to invest similar effort to get the AMP pages to the same quality. While
this may be a lot of work, this is by design: We recommend to really optimize
AMP pages and fine tune them to your needs. AMP is not a templated format for
that reason. While neither the AMP project, nor Google are directly
responsible for the WordPress plugin, the AMP open source project working
closely with the authors of the plugin(s) to improve the quality and scope.
AMP is very flexible and should be capable of providing most features of a
typical WordPress site, but this flexibility also requires respective work to
make custom plugins and development show up in the AMP version.

Getting more literal about “stealing traffic”: there are audience measurement
platforms that attribute traffic to publishers. They might in theory wrongly
attribute AMP traffic to the AMP Cache (not Google) rather than to a publisher
because they primarily use referrer information. That is why we worked with
them in worldwide outreach to get this corrected (where it was a problem), so
that traffic is correctly attributed to the publisher. If this is still a
problem anywhere, AMP treats it as a highest priority to get it resolved.

“Ask Google to give users an easy option to view the original post.”

Let us start by saying that we love URLs as much as everyone else, and we
tried hard to make the AMP URL scheme as usable as possible given the
technical constraints of web apps. We’re looking at ways to make the source
link more discoverable and will update once that is done. AMP is super
flexible in terms of how a publisher can direct traffic to their site. Typical
ways to get to a publisher’s homepage (like clicking the logo) should just
work and are in no way restricted. Also, make sure to check out amp-sidebar
([https://ampbyexample.com/components/amp-
sidebar/](https://ampbyexample.com/components/amp-sidebar/)) for adding a menu
to your AMP pages.

If you are not comfortable with traffic on your AMP pages, please do not
publish AMP pages. Google Search has 2 types of AMP related features:

Normal search: AMP does not influence ranking. Your pages will appear in the
same spot with or without AMP. AMP specific features (such as the “Top Stories
Carousel”): For these features, we believe that AMP is the format that
currently delivers the best possible user experience on the mobile web. That
is because AMP allows for consistent speed, caching, pre-rendering, and
enables swiping between full-length pages. This is a big deal for topics where
there isn’t “that one best result” that a user might want to look at.

“Google takes away ad revenue on AMP pages”

AMP supports over 60 ad networks (2 of them are owned by Google) with 2-3
coming on board every week and makes absolutely no change to business terms
whatsoever. There is no special revenue share for AMP.

“If Google cares so much about the mobile experience, why cover 15% of the
small mobile screen with a fat bar at the top?”

The Android users might have already noticed that it is now scrolling out of
the way and the same is coming soon for iOS (we’re just fighting a few jank
issues in Safari). Similarly we’re spearheading a long term effort
([https://github.com/bokand/NonDocumentRootScroller](https://github.com/bokand/NonDocumentRootScroller))
to allow web apps to define how the address bar is hidden on scrolling. It
looks like this will land in Chrome soon, providing even more space to web
pages.

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frandroid
It's been known all along that Google AMP serves pages from its CDN and that
Google adds a bar at the top. The author would have know as well if they had
paid attention from the get go instead of bragging about their 5 minute
"install". Nothing to see here, move along.

~~~
mtarnovan
Yes there is something to see here: Google doesn't provide a way to reach the
original site from the version they serve from their CDN.

~~~
frandroid
You can click on any of the links in the article. It will get out of the
Google AMP session, and open them in a browser. You can have your own site
header and whatever series of links pointing inside your site, like you would
on your regular non-amp landing page. This author is whining about a non-
problem.

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bandrami
The new Google News interface has done this for a while and I absolutely hate
it.

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freyir
I don't know if it's because I'm using an iOS ad blocker or the sites are
misconfigured, but many AMO sites simply fail to load on my iPhone. AMP has
been an awful experience for me, as an end user.

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Otto42
"Cache-Control: private"

Google has to be respecting Cache-Control headers, right? Set your AMP pages
to return that. Then they won't be allowed to cache them.

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adjwilli
I've been wondering if AMP isn't an play to actively decreased app installs.
You can't include a Smart App Banner in an AMP page.

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nashashmi
My biggest problem with AMP is I can never go directly to the source. AMP has
buggy scrolling and can be quite annoying sometimes.

~~~
randomguy7788
long press on link and click open in new tab on search

~~~
nashashmi
thanks. but it doesn't work.

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z3t4
I think the next step for Google is to provide a free hosting service, where
ad income is shared by Google and the content provider.

~~~
geostyx
I agree, since that's pretty much what AMP is doing (free cdn/hosting.)

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MyMan1
Seeing analytics built into AMP makes me laugh. Does that not go against
producing the most enjoyable user experience possible?

~~~
disruptalot
No because you can have both at the same time? When was the last time you
noticed there was analytics happening on the page you were on?

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eyeareque
Would a robots file block google from caching your site? I guess that would
block google entirely though..

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pmlnr
Not the AMP version. The AMP version is there for Google only, so if you want
to prevent them from caching, simply don't serve an AMP version.

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emodendroket
I ran into this but didn't know what was going on. Seems kind of sleazy.

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VOYD
"may be"?

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antocv
Ridiculous.

Try using www.yandex.com as your search engine, it is surprisingly good, and
has less ads disguised as "search results" and results from blog-spam sites
and such nonsense.

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matt4077
I can't wait 'till the author finds out that sometimes the browsers cache
resources... These terrible browsers stealing his page impressions.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Are you implying this is the same thing?

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emilssolmanis
So you installed a WP plugin without doing any research and hoped it would
make your pages faster by using unicorns and magic, or to quote

> Most importantly, I was surprised to find out that instead of redirecting
> users to an optimized version hosted on my server, Google was actually
> serving a snapshot of the page from their own cache.

and now you're upset that they really only made it faster via caching it, not
actual magic.

Were you perchance born yesterday or are you just very naive...?

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Your comment is very similar to victim blaming.

