
Google AMP Issue: Links to visit the site currently not working - scotchio
https://twitter.com/scotch_io/status/1138316707150348288
======
bluetidepro
It's ironic to me that AMP is a problem we all brought upon ourselves, really.
It's almost (jokingly) a Prisoner's dilemma [1]. Had no one ever opted into
it, it probably would have just been swept under the rug by Google, and a win-
win for us all. But since a competitor of yours ( _probably_ ) opted into it
to get ahead of you, you now _have_ to opt into it also, to compete and get
the same SEO "power juice" it gave them. The fact that everyone now adds the
code to their site to make it work with AMP is the problem. Google gave us the
rope. And then all the SEO managers/marketers/specialists hung us with it. Ha

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma)

~~~
apexalpha
Counterpoint:

WE don't live in an ideal world and AMP is my only option of getting de-
bloated webpages. I would love if managers and directors would do this
themselves and AMP wouldn't be needed, but that's just not the case.

I have to choose between downloading some text and images to read an article
or load 5MB JavaScript SinglePageApp with tracking, ads, auto playing
video's...

I know in an ideal world AMP would be useless, but until we reach that world
I'm going to prefer AMP links over normal ones.

~~~
bluetidepro
I understand your point, but I guess I just wish it wasn't an "either or"
world, so we both could enjoy the web how we would respectively like. Why
won't Google let us have both? Right now, I don't believe there is a way to
disable AMP ( _unless you use like a Firefox mobile extension for that
specific use case_ ). That's what bothers me the most, personally. Google
shoving it down our throats, and force feeding us AMP is so user hostile. Let
the user decide, even if it was hidden under a super obscure setting in
something like chrome://flags/, that'd be better. It's a simple win-win for
everyone.

~~~
apexalpha
I agree with you. I would prefer a world where AMP isn't needed and websites
don't ad 4MB of bloat to their sites.

But, we don't live in that world I'm afraid. And for many news websites I
don't want to even begin downloading the auto-playing video on their page. So
AMP is for many the easiest choice.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
AMP is not needed to promote less bloated websites in search results. Google
could easily boost the ranking of lightweight websites without AMP.

AMP is an obvious abuse of a dominant market position and Google will come to
regret it.

~~~
dcbadacd
They could, but then we'd see a lot of cheaters even there, AMP is very locked
down. I don't like the market position abuse either, but the other parties are
far from guilt free.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
Of course SEO will never end. But if the question is how to improve the open
web, then turning the open web into a Google property is not an answer.

~~~
dcbadacd
Signed exchanges are a thing, I don't see how Google intervenes there more
than just providing the AMP standard.

------
xupybd
Just came to say I hate amp. If I want to go to a site I want that site not a
google cache of it. It’s not a better experience. It just means another click
to get to where I was going. Stop the madness Google kill amp.

~~~
OskarS
I don't think I've ever seen anyone on HN defend AMP. We all hate it. It's a
pox on the modern web.

~~~
a254613e
Depends on who you mean by "we", people working directly on
implementing/supporting AMP? Anti-google crowd? Sure, you're probably right.

But as someone who's just an end user, and not working on frontend development
who likes AMP, I don't bother commenting when the opinion is extremely skewed
to one side.

I love AMP. The website loads faster, feels a lot snappier, and is overall
positive experience for me. That's what I care about. I don't care how it got
to that point, I want usable and fast loading website - and AMP gives me that.

Can this be speed and mobile friendliness be implemented without AMP? Yes. Is
it implemented without AMP? Very rarely.

Of course there's the argument with google trying to get a tighter grip on web
and while that is not a good thing the truth is that I, and huge majority of
average consumers, just don't care if it means better results for me.

~~~
TelmoMenezes
I highly doubt that you are just the "end user" you claim to be, otherwise you
wouldn't be here, having this discussion. But let's assume that you are.

>Of course there's the argument with google trying to get a tighter grip on
web and while that is not a good thing the truth is that I, and huge majority
of average consumers, just don't care if it means better results for me.

What you are describing is the very common mix of "tragedy of the commons" \+
"pure utilitarianism". The future would be vastly better if everyone made a
small sacrifice now, but each individual action counts for so little that you
make the selfish but rational choice of letting others do the small sacrifice.

Maybe your page loads faster now, but this is happening by risking the
destruction of the very environment that makes such pages worth reading
(independent journalism, freedom from corporate control, etc.). In the long
run, it means worse results for you, but your individual sacrifice is unlikely
to have any effect. You feel selfish, so you rationalize a story where you are
just the "common person" doing what makes sense.

The fact that we have a civilization is proof that there are ways out of this
deadlock. For a long time, the answer was religion. We need something for the
XXI century to play that role, i.e. making people think not only as
individuals but also members of an entire species, ecosystem, etc.

Meanwhile, what you are saying amounts to: "fuck you, I got mine".

~~~
albertsondev
Don't forget that they don't even actually load faster, but rather support the
illusion of such because Google lazy-loads a few of them in the background
while you're reading through the search results. Which honestly has some
merits of its own, though it's a kick in the dick for metered data.

------
tobr
Arguably this means that Google is breaking point 11 of their own AMP Cache
Guidelines [1]. If I ran any AMP pages, I would be quite upset.

1:
[https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-c...](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-
cache-guidelines.md)

~~~
rangerpolitic
When you have the power to write the rules, you can break the rules. Google is
too powerful.

------
granshaw
I hope AMP is the straw that breaks the camels back in googles antitrust suit
- its the most blatant and shameless abuse of their position, IMO

------
eska
When I attended the Drupal Europe 2018 conference I had the opportunity to
talk to Barb Palser of the AMP global relations team. I asked her in an
intentionally innocent way: "I thought AMP is supposed to replace RSS, but
from the presentation it seems like it's trying to be a better HTML?" to which
she replied yes. I acted all optimistic, so she wouldn't be defensive, but
this conversation sent chills down my spine and I remember it to this day.

~~~
ec109685
What would it even mean to be better RSS? The idea is sites can preload an AMP
page safely so that when you click on it, it can display to the user
instantly.

In that specific case, isn’t Barb correct, no chills needed?

~~~
UweSchmidt
The fundamental change is that now the content comes from Google's servers.
Google is hosting the Internet.

Of course Google can't host illegal content on their service, right? And won't
host content that goes against a future AMP user agreement...

From there they can tighten the screws against competitors, or future attempts
at privacy, or basically anything they get away with.

~~~
joshuamorton
Do you also think that CDNs are bad, since you end up accessing content from
the first parties?

~~~
UweSchmidt
With CDNs I can decide which to use for my site, if any. If AMP gets
established as the "new HTML", the new way Internet content is provided, then
it's under Google's control.

------
firasd
When AMP was introduced I assumed the actual content would be loaded from the
canonical URL anyway. This whole in-between caching layer G introduced is very
weird.

Also, I think what AMP was pitted against--Facebook instant articles--no
longer exists, or at least doesn't particularly matter (now that FB is several
pivots beyond the whole 'newsfeed is full of articles' stage).

~~~
jefftk
One way to think of AMP is as a solution to "When people click on links from
search the pages often load very slowly. Can we make this instant?" Any
preloading based solution has to involve caching, because otherwise sites
could learn that they had shown up in your search results without you having
clicked on then.

(Disclosure: I work at Google, not on AMP, and I'm only speaking for myself)

~~~
iforgotpassword
While this might have been one of the reasons, most likely from the (sometimes
rather native) perspective of devs, I still attribute mostly malice to this
whole thing and hope it gets them good in the whole antitrust issue. Even if
it were just that, trying to tackle slow loading pages out of selflessness on
Google's side, I can only say: None of your ducking business. Make sure _your_
pages load fast, and then that's it.

~~~
jefftk
_> trying to tackle slow loading pages out of selflessness on Google's side_

I'm not sure where you're getting "selflessness". The faster pages load from
search the better people's experience of using search is. This directly
benefits both Google and people who use search.

~~~
iforgotpassword
Then don't link to slow pages. Stop pretending to be the internet.

------
graeme
AMP links are a major reason I switched to duckduckgo on mobile. Google seems
to be shortsighted in doing this.

Yes, only a tiny minority of technical users will know what amp pages are and
switch search engines to avoid them. But, a larger group will likely find the
amp pages _annoying_ , even if they can't precisely articulate why. This
weakens google's hold on the market.

~~~
michaelmior
Why do you think a larger group will find AMP annoying? I know I'm in the
minority, but I generally like AMP in my search results.

~~~
graeme
If it breaks things. For example, I had a common issue where reddit links in
search didn't have comments and I had to click through to get to them

If the amp page displays what you expect, it works well. It it makes you click
through, it doesn't.

Of course, users may or may not realize amp/google are the reason a site is
broke.

Dunno how many people have issues like this though. Reddit was the main one
for me, plus a few random sites having issues.

~~~
michaelmior
"broken" and "requiring an extra click" seem like two different things to me.
Although I understand that you're not getting what you expected, so my
judgement here is subjective.

~~~
graeme
It may not be obvious to users _why_ their site is broken. Of course, at that
stage they may blame the site unless they know why the site appears that way
in the first place.

But it isn't always obvious how to get to the site from an AMP page.

~~~
michaelmior
My point was that "broken" feels like the wrong term. I think the site owner
should be blamed if content the user needs is not either on the AMP page or
accessible with an easily found link.

~~~
larkeith
> I think the site owner should be blamed if content the user needs is not
> either on the AMP page or accessible with an easily found link.

Hmm. If AMP participation were voluntary, I would agree, but given how
necessary it is to SEO ranking, Google deserves a _large_ portion of any blame
for broken content - They do not get a free pass to enforce usage of a
protocol, but dodge the consequences of its implementation (which will always
involve friction and some breakage).

~~~
michaelmior
Fair point :) For my own stuff, I don't really care too much about SEO so I'm
not sure what the full implications are.

------
mtarnovan
<tinfoil> What if it's not a bug, but Google testing user response </tinfoil>

(assuming Google is not stupid so Hanlon's razor may not apply)

~~~
SCHiM
Your post remined me of this twitter thread from one of mozzilla's developers:

[https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871240432660480](https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871240432660480)

Downthread:

""" And every time, they’d say, “oops. That was accidental. We’ll fix it in
the next push in 2 weeks.” """

~~~
mtarnovan
I remember that thread now. Well, looks like standard Google behavior then.

------
seieste
This seems to be a way for Google to make revenue from news sites and is a
clear abuse of monopoly power. When I click on an AMP news link, I see a
“carousel” at the top that shows multiple news articles. I can go to various
articles on a topic by swiping left or right, all without going back to the
news site.

But now that Google has removed the link to visit the site, it is clear they
don’t want you to visit the actual news site but do everything through Google.

This means that only the Google ad network will be allowed, so they stand to
benefit from this arrangement, and news sites can have no hope of receiving
any traffic.

~~~
ec109685
No, multiple ad networks (100+) are allowed in google amp, so publishers are
free to chose what monetizes best: [https://marketingland.com/google-
says-100-ad-networks-suppor...](https://marketingland.com/google-says-100-ad-
networks-support-amp-releases-3rd-party-technology-support-234579)

------
justicz
Yes! I’ve been having this issue for days but assumed it was just me. It is
particularly frustrating for sites like Reddit where the AMP version is too
aggressively cached and misses most of the recent comments.

~~~
tannhaeuser
Reddit plays it's own games. While they dropped the aggressive "Use app"
nagging, they now frequently and purposefully (?) break back-navigation (eg.
from individual posts to the subreddit) with the all too common "Oh snap.
Something went wrong" and cutesy picture excuse for a dysfunctional site.

~~~
bitL
Reddit is fun now; start Tor, try to visit a soon-to-be-banned sub-reddit,
enjoy Tor's tracking notifications not present on normal reddit sub-reddits.
Looks like reddit is turning into one large honeypot.

~~~
heinrich5991
I don't understand, can you elaborate? What are Tor's tracking notifications?

~~~
seieste
I think bitL is saying that reddit embeds some sort of tracking script in
“soon-to-be-banned subreddits” that they don’t embed in normal subteddits, and
that you can tell this from notifications within Tor

~~~
playpause
Still don't follow. Why track soon-to-be-banned subreddits differently?

~~~
bitL
Don't ask me, it's just an observation. I don't think Reddit employs imbeciles
so the usual "oops, a bug there!" is unlikely. But given it's pretty easy to
track a visitor across multiple social networks in real time, including their
real identity, it's good to be aware of it and even being a bit paranoid about
one's privacy while on Reddit.

------
SiempreViernes
I don't know anything about AMP, so I'm genuinely amazed that one could create
bugs in it that just downright break hyper references.

I though links was a pretty important part of HTML, and so people took care to
ensure they work?

~~~
piecu
Not for google. They want to kill links.

~~~
ehnto
What do they intend to replace them with?

~~~
gatherhunterer
As far as I know they have not proposed a replacement, only an intention to
come up with one.

~~~
shakna
They've proposed the 'portal' element in the last month [0] to replace the
link with something... Different... Haven't they?

[0] [https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-launches-portals-a-
new-...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-launches-portals-a-new-web-page-
navigation-system-for-chrome/)

~~~
michaelmior
Portal is moreso an alternative to iframes than an alternative to links. But
it's true that it could very well make it more likely for a portal to another
site to be included in a page rather than using a link.

~~~
ehnto
They still use a link to source the embedded page as well, it's just that a
portal is a bit more friendly with the host frame.

------
dgellow
Interesting, I didn't even consider that could be a bug. I just assumed that
was how AMP was supposed to behave and moved to Duckduckgo for mobile search.

------
hn_throwaway_99
I'm surprised I haven't seen more discussion on the actual bug in the
comments. In the screen capture the user shows, the AMP header shows the link
icon in the upper right corner, and when you click it it should show the real
URL and let you navigate through (but that's not happening, hence the bug).

However, in _my_ experience the header is totally different. There is an (i)
icon in the upper left corner that shows the link when tapped, and the upper
right corner shows the share icon and tapping it opens the share dialog. Note
this changed for me recently (I used to get the link icon like the poster).

So Google is clearly testing different behavior, which probably led to the
bug. In any case, I'd note the version I got that I think the (i) is much less
clear than the link icon, and I'm sure the end result is people clicking
through to the source site less often. Fuck Google and their aggressive
attempts to hijack the web even more than they already have.

~~~
kunday
I think in general anything about amp receives a bit of attention to put it
mildly. I'm curious if anyone from amp/google is lurking around to give a
perspective. It is reproducible on all my devices now. I remember it working
at least yesterday...

------
vbsteven
So many people in this thread complain about AMP being forced on them as an
end user. Nobody forces you to use Google...

Just use another search engine like DuckDuckGo. It is sufficient for over 90%
of my searches and I haven’t seen an amp page in ages.

AMP for SEO is another discussion, in that case it is kind of forced on you if
you want to rank high on the Googlenet.

~~~
ckuhl
The problem is that _everyone else uses Google_.

Even though I don’t use Google for search, my friends do and they’ll gladly
share AMP pages with me.

~~~
ndiscussion
"Weird, what web site even is that?"

------
CDSlice
First of all, I'm not a web developer, so I may not get all the problems with
AMP.

I actually love AMP on mobile. Every site I've used(1) that has an AMP version
loads faster and works better even with some ads than the normal version on
Firefox mobile with uBlock Origin. Given that it's possible for people to host
their own AMP cache (like Cloudflare does), I really don't see the problem
with AMP itself.

(1) Other then Reddit, but considering how much of a dumpster fire their
normal mobile site is I honestly think that it's broken on purpose to try and
make people use the app.

------
krn
The AMP links to visit the original site are working fine for me on Brave
(based on Chromium) on Android: clicking on the "(i)" icon shows the URL.

The easiest way to to get rid of all AMP pages in Google search results is to
disable javascript on www.google.com/*.

~~~
tobr
Doesn’t work on iPhone Safari for me, I get the same translucent gray overlay
regardless of where I tap.

~~~
krn
Could it be an iOS/Safari-specific bug?

~~~
luckylion
The tweet says it's Chrome on iOS.

~~~
madeofpalk
Which is still actually Safari/Webkit as foreign rendering engines are not
allowed to ship on iOS.

------
dgellow
Maybe an obvious or stupid question, but that's worth asking: As a user, do we
have a way to disable AMP?

~~~
robin_reala
Use DuckDuckGo instead? There’s no switch in Google.

------
SimeVidas
A reminder that AMP results don’t show up on Google Search if you use the
mobile version of Firefox ;)

~~~
robin_reala
Yet…

------
onesmallcoin
Chromium on mobile has always had issues with AMP for me, I've just come to
acept it I think it's wrong for a monopoly to take control of what another
entitys site looks like. It's a we can take care of EVERYBODY feature: we were
fine without it and will be fine when it doesn't exist anymore

------
ycombonator
Try this [https://phys.org/news/2019-06-mass-anomaly-moon-largest-
crat...](https://phys.org/news/2019-06-mass-anomaly-moon-largest-crater.html)
on iOS safari. The source link does not open.

------
sn_master
I also absolutely hate how it lets you zoom out but not zoom in. Have to
reload the entire page to get it to the original size :/

------
godelmachine
May I ask what screen recording app is he using?

~~~
baloki
It’s built into iOS nowadays, you can add it to your control centre via
settings.

~~~
josefresco
I just discovered this, after my daughter told me about it. You need to set it
to show in your control center first.

------
sexy_seedbox
Use Kiwi Browser, it has built-in AMP removal.

------
raverbashing
Oh look another "completely innocent mistake" by Google

~~~
luckylion
You're getting downvoted, presumably because "they wouldn't be evil", but I
find the alternative just as problematic: a superpower tech company with a
budget larger than many nation states hiring the best and the brightest and
paying them unbelievably well so they do their best.. breaking fundamental
features in widely used software and not realizing it themselves (they
wouldn't ship the update otherwise, I believe). What's happening there?

And the follow up thought: "move fast and break things" suggests that we
should think twice before relying on these companies for anything close to
critical infrastructure.

------
kerng
Google's power abuse with AMP is really upsetting. Hopefully this is being
looked into and AMP canned before its spread via monopoly is irreversible.
It's bad for all, but Google.

------
ycombonator
Happens in iOS Safari too

------
otabdeveloper3
Why would you want to visit sites that aren't Google (c)? They're probably
very unsafe and full of very annoying ads!

------
hexo
Simple. Don't use it. It doesn't make any sense anyway.

~~~
tannhaeuser
Sure if it's your site, you don't use AMP - it just indicates disregard for
basic web usability and competence. But what about the (rare) site using AMP
with you having no control? Hmm ... ok thinking about it I don't know any site
using AMP worth reading. I guess using AMP, like script-heavy content, is just
a negative marker for quality content.

------
vortico
Isn't AMP blatant copyright infringement? If so, how does a website owner
demand the infringement to be taken down?

~~~
bluetidepro
The sites themselves are opting into AMP, I believe. Google isn't just
converting the site to AMP automatically. The owners of the site themselves
have to add code to their site for it to work with AMP...

~~~
vortico
Oh, I see. Never mind then. I've never used AMP so thought it was automatic
for all or most websites on the internet.

~~~
tomglynch
Google strong-arms sites into implementing AMP by giving SEO boosts to those
sites, such as showing your articles in the "Top stories" section

