19 ms·

Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

533 points by akras14 10y ago

hannob 10y ago
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.
- spiderfarmer 10y ago
  What's stopping Google from promoting fast webpages without AMP? I have spent weeks improving load times for my websites, with A A A A A ratings op webpagetest.org as a result. AMP is just a fraction faster, why should I have to create a seperate AMP version? Also, my websites are essentially all dynamic content. People come for the comments, like on HN. I gues I'll have to use some cache-busting javascript if Google caches my content?
  - jasoncartwright 10y ago
    They do promote fast pages: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-i... "we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings"
    - jonknee 10y ago
      Sure, but then they put a lightning bolt next to any AMP page, even if your non-AMP page is faster.
    - spiderfarmer 10y ago
      I really doubt that that factor has any real influence on ranking. In my niche there are notoriously slow websites at the top that aren't even responsive in some cases. Just like the promised benefits of HTTPS. I have yet to hear about a case where search traffic increased after switching to HTTPS.
  - ryanobjc 10y ago
    The AMP Cache is an option that you can opt in to. The wordpress plugin by default opts in. The author said as much. The problem isn't that Google "steals" traffic in the sense it's going against the wishes of the site publisher, but that the author didn't know what he was buying in to and thus was surprised. There is the other thing which is the AMP Cache is probably more local and faster than your site. Small sites usually dont use CDNs so there it is.
    - gergles 10y ago
      No, it is not optional. If you publish a valid AMP page and Google finds out about it, it will be cached. https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/faq https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/faq > Can I stop content from being cached? > No. By using the AMP format, content producers are making the content in AMP files available to be cached by third parties. For example, Google products use the Google AMP Cache to serve AMP content as fast as possible.
      - spiderfarmer 10y ago
        So cache-busting Javascript will be needed, which will kind of defeat the purpose.
    - spiderfarmer 10y ago
      > Small sites usually dont use CDNs so there it is. I think it's easier to use a CDN like CDN77 than to convert the average site to AMP.
- walshemj 10y ago
  Every time I look at a website its shocking how no one even does basic image optimisation using PS on the images. This is such a trivial optimisation it makes you wonder about the level of competency of the average web development company.
  - jasonkostempski 10y ago
    Is there an alternative that doesn't require a monthly subscription?
    - criddell 10y ago
      http://www.imagemagick.org/script/convert.php http://www.imagemagick.org/script/convert.php You can insert ImageMagick somewhere into your production pipeline. It's excellent software.
      - lmm 10y ago
        Well other than being riddled with security holes. It has its place, but never use it on user-submitted images.
        microcolonel 10y ago
        While that may have been true in 2014, today it's hard to find an exploitable bug affecting a major image format parser in ImageMagick. Assuming you aren't using unsanitized user-provided parameters on the command line with it, it should be fine unless your attacker is very motivated.
        nitrogen 10y ago
        There was an RCE vulnerability this year: https://imagetragick.com/ https://imagetragick.com/
        tetromino_ 10y ago
- rebelde 10y ago
  > 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 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure non tech users don't even know what AMP is for.
    - lmm 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        >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.
        mthoms 10y ago
        I'm pretty sure Google has extensively tested the CTR's of SERP pages with and without the AMP logo. There's absolutely no way they would have implemented it if it resulted in a lower click-through rate. That would run counter to their own stated goals with AMP. Google tests and re-tests the crap out of things like this.
        10y ago
- pk22 10y ago
  Would you rather have an internet where every website has a design like an article from Wikipedia? Google is probably in their right to highlight pages using AMP (it's their search engine) but probably unfair.
  - mark_edward 10y ago
    Oh God yes please. So many sites would actually be readable. This is how you get things like Readability getting popular
  - x1798DE 10y ago
    It would be amazing if every website were designed like Wikipedia. With the exception of MediaViewer, Wikipedia is one of the best-designed websites out there. It's light, content-prominent, progressively enhanced, HTTPS-only. Even their mobile site is pretty good (though basically all mobile experiences are bad nowadays). What exactly is wrong with Wikipedia's design?
    - NoGravitas 10y ago
      Wikipedia's mobile site is fantastic, IMO. I really wish all mobile sites were like Wikipedia's. The pain of browsing the web on mobile would go away completely.
      - x1798DE 10y ago
        I think it's mostly OK. A lot of my problems with mobile would be alleviated if I could get a browser to reflow text on demand. It used to be you could set your zoom level, double tap and the page would reflow to the new zoom level. This doesn't seem possible now, so I'm always scrolling side to side if I want to be zoomed in a bit more. I have a few other minor problems about how Wikipedia's mobile page handles without Javascript enabled, but one big thing is that there's a minimum zoom level set. I can zoom in, but I can't zoom out, which means if I want more text per line, there's nothing to be done. This again feeds in to the lack of reflow in mobile browsers. I have no idea why this feature went away, but it completely ruined the mobile web for me.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  Diet pill mentality. People don't want to put in an effort to lose 25 lbs, they'd rather take a pill. Same here. People don't want to put in the effort to make something better, they want Google to do it.
  - savanaly 10y ago
    I don't agree with this analogy. It's not like google is offering to redo your site in AMP for you. You still have to do the lightweight optimization yourself. You're just using a library that will guide you in how to do it by imposing restrictions like not loading from too many sources. It's more like people don't feel like following a weight loss program until a trusted professional outlines an easy to follow and precise method.
- untog 10y ago
  > If you don't like AMP nobody stops you from doing the same thing. Yes and no. Google ranks AMP-ed pages differently, as well as showing that lightning bolt icon. It is definitely not a level playing field.
OJFord 10y ago
> 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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      Google wants you back in their serps as fast as possible and for you to notice that it's an option.
matt4077 10y ago
I can't wait 'till the author finds out that sometimes the browsers cache resources... These terrible browsers stealing his page impressions.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  Are you implying this is the same thing?
visarga 10y ago
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.
- butner 10y ago
  But the user is expecting to go to the site. Agree w/ OP's concern.
  - fixermark 10y ago
    The user is expecting to see the content of the site, not "go to" the site. Most users do not actually care what the URL bar says. We know this because of the number of people who get to Facebook by searching for "Facebook".
- pcl 10y ago
  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 10y ago
bcatanzaro 10y ago
Slightly off topic, but on my iPhone (7, 10.0.2), AMP pages from Google never render. I just get a blank screen: https://i.imgbox.com/8EkaRn8t.png https://i.imgbox.com/8EkaRn8t.png Has anyone else seen this?
yoz-y 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
  - fenomas 10y ago
    Hugely agree - this feels like a dark pattern callback to one of the early web's uglier constructs. I mean - running a "we'll host your page for you in exchange for injecting a toolbar" service isn't necessarily an evil thing to do. But there's no reason to opt people into it just because they're tying to perform well on mobile.
    - yoz-y 10y ago
      I suspect the toolbar is there to clearly identify the origin URL. As you can see, safari gives you no hint that this page is not actually google: https://imgur.com/a/2BtMX https://imgur.com/a/2BtMX As for the X button, I suppose google wishes people to use google search result like a news reader. I agree that it is redundant with the back button but the interaction does seem faster (I suspect that the page is actually loaded in an iframe on top of the results page)
      - Tepix 10y ago
        They could just use a better domain name such as googlecached.com
lucaspiller 10y ago
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
- what_ever 10y ago
  I think you are missing one point though - Having that AMP message with the lightning symbol next to your search result in the rich snippet as well as coming up as a result in the carousel at the top of the search results (search for some news terms and you will see what I am talking about) increases organic search traffic as well as CTR. Almost all of the media companies are doing it for that reason and actually making pages fast.
  - Svenskunganka 10y ago
    You have a good point, but how Google approaches this problem is wrong in my opinion. Why can't they just rank the page by the amount of junk it has in the first place, instead of actively looking for an AMP-optimized page? If they were doing that, the media companies (and any other site which isn't in the deep web) would be working towards making their content minimal at the core, not branching off with an "optimized" version of the page. This would make the browsing experience better for all devices, not just mobile users.
    - SquareWheel 10y ago
      Page speed is still a ranking factor. Optimizing pages and reducing bloat does have a positive effect in all SERPs. By my understanding though, AMP is more specific to mobile. A light page may or may not render well on mobile, but AMP pages almost always will. I'm still undecided on if I like AMP or not, but I do see the reason for the distinction.
Animats 10y ago
It's not your site any more. You're just a free content provider to Google now.
- niftich 10y ago
  The author is regretfully realizing that in this day and age when so much of the discoverability of the web is dominated by Google, Facebook, and a handful other players, content is a commodity that these gatekeepers compete over for the privilege of serving as entry-points, and with it, getting analytics and ad network data. But on the plus side, it's a free CDN, if you're passionate about your content.
  - mSparks 10y ago
    Actually realised last week I hardly use google search anymore. And cant remember the last time i saw - let alone clicked on an ad (clickbait excluded). Not that I've switched to another search provider as much as search isn't the entry point to the internet it once was (especially with no google on tor sites). That techies like me dont rely on them any more and non techies all share stuff via facebook must be hurting their page and ad hits. Makes me wonder if this is more a move of desperation on their part. Food for thought even if it is a little too forward thinking.
    - sangnoir 10y ago
      > That techies like me dont rely on them any more You're going to have to cite some data for that bold assertion. Lot's of techies outside of your bubble still use (and rely) on Google.
      - mSparks 10y ago
        I'm drawing a distinction between use/rely and how it was previously. Does anyone still have google search as their home page? And if they do, do they use it? When was the last time you got past the first page of results? (and btw, its so rare that that people do now did you know if you get past the first couple of pages it checks whether you are a bot). Im contrasting how it used to be (reading google results making up a good majority of the time online) to how it is now (no more than 1 or 2 pages a day, sometimes not even that in a week)
andrewaylett 10y ago
This feels much more like FB's "instant articles" than what I actually want (as a user) from my web pages.
niftich 10y ago
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-use-fast-loading-tech/ https://www.wired.com/2016/02/google-will-now-favor-pages-us... [2] https://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web-changing-works/ https://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web-chang...
pmontra 10y ago
> 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 10y ago
  "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 10y ago
    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.
- laurent123456 10y ago
  > 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. Maybe they just want people to get used to this bar on top, and then start A/B testing it with ads and see what reaction they get.
- SlashmanX 10y ago
  > 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's to counteract the fact that in some browsers on mobile, it will just show "google.com" in the URL bar, the added bar shows the actual website. (Obviously this is a problem introduced by the whole caching thing but that's why it's there I guess)
antocv 10y ago
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.
SimeVidas 10y ago
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.
eyeareque 10y ago
Would a robots file block google from caching your site? I guess that would block google entirely though..
- pmlnr 10y ago
  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.
laser 10y ago
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 10y ago
  I've asked @amphtml why they're adding it: https://twitter.com/mikemaccana/status/787968936251981824 https://twitter.com/mikemaccana/status/787968936251981824
  - SlashmanX 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      Trying to fix an issue that the AMP system itself introduced.
  - laser 10y ago
    Thanks, that's a relief.
Aissen 10y ago
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 10y ago
  > 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 10y ago
    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…
mehmetkose 10y ago
My website is already fast on mobile. Because I am using gulp, and compressing the UI. I have added AMP because of seo. But wtf is this? FUK yourself google! I'll delete amp on my site.
- VeejayRampay 10y ago
  Please try to refrain from using profanity. It doesn't add anything to your point but mere shock value and it gives a bad impression of Hacker News to visitors.
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  That'll show them. Cut your nose off to spite your face.
- sctb 10y ago
  We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the guidelines. Profanity is not against the rules, but we do ask that commenters post civilly and substantively and this account has done neither.
abrar39 10y ago
I don't think. but if is so, I am sure unsolicited, spam or inappropriate Traffic which might harmful for our website is prevented by google
romanovcode 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      How is it making the Internet worse for current users?
      - romanovcode 10y ago
        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 10y ago
        > 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.
buckbova 10y ago
> 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.
z3t4 10y ago
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 10y ago
  I agree, since that's pretty much what AMP is doing (free cdn/hosting.)
jacquesm 10y ago
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.
- coderjames 10y ago
  > I would expect an un-biased search engine to rate pages with and without AMP equal Well there's your problem :-). Google isn't an unbiased search engine, they're a commercial entity with a financial interest in feeding you particular search results. They're absolutely going to be biased in the results they provide you.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
    They also have near-monopoly status on search, so they must not be anticompetitive.
    - leereeves 10y ago
      But it will take years for the government to do anything about it. Longer, perhaps, if Hillary is elected with Eric Schmidt's help.[1] 1: http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working-for-hillary-clinton-campaign/ http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working...
      - geofft 10y ago
        Why do you think that "person X supports candidate Y" implies "candidate Y will help person X commit more crimes without penalty"? Is that true of all people and all candidates, or only some?
dkersten 10y ago
> 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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.
- ryandrake 10y ago
emilssolmanis 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Your comment is very similar to victim blaming.
frandroid 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
shortformblog 10y ago
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.)
tonmoy 10y ago
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.
AJ007 10y ago
"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 10y ago
  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.
  - state_less 10y ago
    Therein lies the problem, Google owns 80% of the market. Google is a de-facto monopoly. They can force you to act against your long term interests for a short term gain. I personally find the gain suspicious, it's already possible to make fast pages. Soon, we'll all merely be Google content providers.
wtbob 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      Did you click the support first-viewport preloading link?
    - boto3 10y ago
      embrace, extend and extinguish
bandrami 10y ago
The new Google News interface has done this for a while and I absolutely hate it.
nashashmi 10y ago
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 10y ago
  long press on link and click open in new tab on search
  - nashashmi 10y ago
    thanks. but it doesn't work.
freyir 10y ago
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.
adjwilli 10y ago
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.
ggggtez 10y ago
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.
Otto42 10y ago
"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.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
remremz 10y ago
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.
emodendroket 10y ago
I ran into this but didn't know what was going on. Seems kind of sleazy.
Pxtl 10y ago
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.
MyMan1 10y ago
Seeing analytics built into AMP makes me laugh. Does that not go against producing the most enjoyable user experience possible?
- disruptalot 10y ago
  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?
Mikho 10y ago
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 10y ago
  I wish they would kill it, personally. It makes sites feel and act weird different.
akras14 10y ago
A tech lead from Google wrote his response, if anybody is interested: https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile-traffic/#comment-55336 https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile-...
cramforce 10y ago
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.
manigandham 10y ago
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.
brainfire 10y ago
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.
VOYD 10y ago
"may be"?

533 points by akras14 10y ago

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.

spiderfarmer 10y ago
What's stopping Google from promoting fast webpages without AMP? I have spent weeks improving load times for my websites, with A A A A A ratings op webpagetest.org as a result. AMP is just a fraction faster, why should I have to create a seperate AMP version? Also, my websites are essentially all dynamic content. People come for the comments, like on HN. I gues I'll have to use some cache-busting javascript if Google caches my content?
- jasoncartwright 10y ago
  They do promote fast pages: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-i... "we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings"
  - jonknee 10y ago
    Sure, but then they put a lightning bolt next to any AMP page, even if your non-AMP page is faster.
  - spiderfarmer 10y ago
    I really doubt that that factor has any real influence on ranking. In my niche there are notoriously slow websites at the top that aren't even responsive in some cases. Just like the promised benefits of HTTPS. I have yet to hear about a case where search traffic increased after switching to HTTPS.
- ryanobjc 10y ago
  The AMP Cache is an option that you can opt in to. The wordpress plugin by default opts in. The author said as much. The problem isn't that Google "steals" traffic in the sense it's going against the wishes of the site publisher, but that the author didn't know what he was buying in to and thus was surprised. There is the other thing which is the AMP Cache is probably more local and faster than your site. Small sites usually dont use CDNs so there it is.
  - gergles 10y ago
    No, it is not optional. If you publish a valid AMP page and Google finds out about it, it will be cached. https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/faq https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/faq > Can I stop content from being cached? > No. By using the AMP format, content producers are making the content in AMP files available to be cached by third parties. For example, Google products use the Google AMP Cache to serve AMP content as fast as possible.
    - spiderfarmer 10y ago
      So cache-busting Javascript will be needed, which will kind of defeat the purpose.
  - spiderfarmer 10y ago
    > Small sites usually dont use CDNs so there it is. I think it's easier to use a CDN like CDN77 than to convert the average site to AMP.
walshemj 10y ago
Every time I look at a website its shocking how no one even does basic image optimisation using PS on the images. This is such a trivial optimisation it makes you wonder about the level of competency of the average web development company.
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  Is there an alternative that doesn't require a monthly subscription?
  - criddell 10y ago
    http://www.imagemagick.org/script/convert.php http://www.imagemagick.org/script/convert.php You can insert ImageMagick somewhere into your production pipeline. It's excellent software.
    - lmm 10y ago
      Well other than being riddled with security holes. It has its place, but never use it on user-submitted images.
      - microcolonel 10y ago
        While that may have been true in 2014, today it's hard to find an exploitable bug affecting a major image format parser in ImageMagick. Assuming you aren't using unsanitized user-provided parameters on the command line with it, it should be fine unless your attacker is very motivated.
        nitrogen 10y ago
        There was an RCE vulnerability this year: https://imagetragick.com/ https://imagetragick.com/
        tetromino_ 10y ago
rebelde 10y ago
> 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 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure non tech users don't even know what AMP is for.
  - lmm 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      >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.
      - mthoms 10y ago
        I'm pretty sure Google has extensively tested the CTR's of SERP pages with and without the AMP logo. There's absolutely no way they would have implemented it if it resulted in a lower click-through rate. That would run counter to their own stated goals with AMP. Google tests and re-tests the crap out of things like this.
      - 10y ago
pk22 10y ago
Would you rather have an internet where every website has a design like an article from Wikipedia? Google is probably in their right to highlight pages using AMP (it's their search engine) but probably unfair.
- mark_edward 10y ago
  Oh God yes please. So many sites would actually be readable. This is how you get things like Readability getting popular
- x1798DE 10y ago
  It would be amazing if every website were designed like Wikipedia. With the exception of MediaViewer, Wikipedia is one of the best-designed websites out there. It's light, content-prominent, progressively enhanced, HTTPS-only. Even their mobile site is pretty good (though basically all mobile experiences are bad nowadays). What exactly is wrong with Wikipedia's design?
  - NoGravitas 10y ago
    Wikipedia's mobile site is fantastic, IMO. I really wish all mobile sites were like Wikipedia's. The pain of browsing the web on mobile would go away completely.
    - x1798DE 10y ago
      I think it's mostly OK. A lot of my problems with mobile would be alleviated if I could get a browser to reflow text on demand. It used to be you could set your zoom level, double tap and the page would reflow to the new zoom level. This doesn't seem possible now, so I'm always scrolling side to side if I want to be zoomed in a bit more. I have a few other minor problems about how Wikipedia's mobile page handles without Javascript enabled, but one big thing is that there's a minimum zoom level set. I can zoom in, but I can't zoom out, which means if I want more text per line, there's nothing to be done. This again feeds in to the lack of reflow in mobile browsers. I have no idea why this feature went away, but it completely ruined the mobile web for me.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
Diet pill mentality. People don't want to put in an effort to lose 25 lbs, they'd rather take a pill. Same here. People don't want to put in the effort to make something better, they want Google to do it.
- savanaly 10y ago
  I don't agree with this analogy. It's not like google is offering to redo your site in AMP for you. You still have to do the lightweight optimization yourself. You're just using a library that will guide you in how to do it by imposing restrictions like not loading from too many sources. It's more like people don't feel like following a weight loss program until a trusted professional outlines an easy to follow and precise method.
untog 10y ago
> If you don't like AMP nobody stops you from doing the same thing. Yes and no. Google ranks AMP-ed pages differently, as well as showing that lightning bolt icon. It is definitely not a level playing field.

OJFord 10y ago

> 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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Google wants you back in their serps as fast as possible and for you to notice that it's an option.

matt4077 10y ago

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

JustSomeNobody 10y ago
Are you implying this is the same thing?

visarga 10y ago

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.

butner 10y ago
But the user is expecting to go to the site. Agree w/ OP's concern.
- fixermark 10y ago
  The user is expecting to see the content of the site, not "go to" the site. Most users do not actually care what the URL bar says. We know this because of the number of people who get to Facebook by searching for "Facebook".
pcl 10y ago
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 10y ago

bcatanzaro 10y ago

Slightly off topic, but on my iPhone (7, 10.0.2), AMP pages from Google never render. I just get a blank screen: https://i.imgbox.com/8EkaRn8t.png https://i.imgbox.com/8EkaRn8t.png Has anyone else seen this?

yoz-y 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.
- fenomas 10y ago
  Hugely agree - this feels like a dark pattern callback to one of the early web's uglier constructs. I mean - running a "we'll host your page for you in exchange for injecting a toolbar" service isn't necessarily an evil thing to do. But there's no reason to opt people into it just because they're tying to perform well on mobile.
  - yoz-y 10y ago
    I suspect the toolbar is there to clearly identify the origin URL. As you can see, safari gives you no hint that this page is not actually google: https://imgur.com/a/2BtMX https://imgur.com/a/2BtMX As for the X button, I suppose google wishes people to use google search result like a news reader. I agree that it is redundant with the back button but the interaction does seem faster (I suspect that the page is actually loaded in an iframe on top of the results page)
    - Tepix 10y ago
      They could just use a better domain name such as googlecached.com

lucaspiller 10y ago

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

what_ever 10y ago
I think you are missing one point though - Having that AMP message with the lightning symbol next to your search result in the rich snippet as well as coming up as a result in the carousel at the top of the search results (search for some news terms and you will see what I am talking about) increases organic search traffic as well as CTR. Almost all of the media companies are doing it for that reason and actually making pages fast.
- Svenskunganka 10y ago
  You have a good point, but how Google approaches this problem is wrong in my opinion. Why can't they just rank the page by the amount of junk it has in the first place, instead of actively looking for an AMP-optimized page? If they were doing that, the media companies (and any other site which isn't in the deep web) would be working towards making their content minimal at the core, not branching off with an "optimized" version of the page. This would make the browsing experience better for all devices, not just mobile users.
  - SquareWheel 10y ago
    Page speed is still a ranking factor. Optimizing pages and reducing bloat does have a positive effect in all SERPs. By my understanding though, AMP is more specific to mobile. A light page may or may not render well on mobile, but AMP pages almost always will. I'm still undecided on if I like AMP or not, but I do see the reason for the distinction.

Animats 10y ago

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

niftich 10y ago
The author is regretfully realizing that in this day and age when so much of the discoverability of the web is dominated by Google, Facebook, and a handful other players, content is a commodity that these gatekeepers compete over for the privilege of serving as entry-points, and with it, getting analytics and ad network data. But on the plus side, it's a free CDN, if you're passionate about your content.
- mSparks 10y ago
  Actually realised last week I hardly use google search anymore. And cant remember the last time i saw - let alone clicked on an ad (clickbait excluded). Not that I've switched to another search provider as much as search isn't the entry point to the internet it once was (especially with no google on tor sites). That techies like me dont rely on them any more and non techies all share stuff via facebook must be hurting their page and ad hits. Makes me wonder if this is more a move of desperation on their part. Food for thought even if it is a little too forward thinking.
  - sangnoir 10y ago
    > That techies like me dont rely on them any more You're going to have to cite some data for that bold assertion. Lot's of techies outside of your bubble still use (and rely) on Google.
    - mSparks 10y ago
      I'm drawing a distinction between use/rely and how it was previously. Does anyone still have google search as their home page? And if they do, do they use it? When was the last time you got past the first page of results? (and btw, its so rare that that people do now did you know if you get past the first couple of pages it checks whether you are a bot). Im contrasting how it used to be (reading google results making up a good majority of the time online) to how it is now (no more than 1 or 2 pages a day, sometimes not even that in a week)

andrewaylett 10y ago

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

niftich 10y ago

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-use-fast-loading-tech/ https://www.wired.com/2016/02/google-will-now-favor-pages-us... [2] https://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web-changing-works/ https://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web-chang...

pmontra 10y ago

> 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 10y ago
"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 10y ago
  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.
laurent123456 10y ago
> 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. Maybe they just want people to get used to this bar on top, and then start A/B testing it with ads and see what reaction they get.
SlashmanX 10y ago
> 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's to counteract the fact that in some browsers on mobile, it will just show "google.com" in the URL bar, the added bar shows the actual website. (Obviously this is a problem introduced by the whole caching thing but that's why it's there I guess)

antocv 10y ago

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.

SimeVidas 10y ago

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.

eyeareque 10y ago

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

pmlnr 10y ago
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.

laser 10y ago

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 10y ago
I've asked @amphtml why they're adding it: https://twitter.com/mikemaccana/status/787968936251981824 https://twitter.com/mikemaccana/status/787968936251981824
- SlashmanX 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Trying to fix an issue that the AMP system itself introduced.
- laser 10y ago
  Thanks, that's a relief.

Aissen 10y ago

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 10y ago
> 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 10y ago
  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…

mehmetkose 10y ago

My website is already fast on mobile. Because I am using gulp, and compressing the UI. I have added AMP because of seo. But wtf is this? FUK yourself google! I'll delete amp on my site.

VeejayRampay 10y ago
Please try to refrain from using profanity. It doesn't add anything to your point but mere shock value and it gives a bad impression of Hacker News to visitors.
bitmapbrother 10y ago
That'll show them. Cut your nose off to spite your face.
sctb 10y ago
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the guidelines. Profanity is not against the rules, but we do ask that commenters post civilly and substantively and this account has done neither.

abrar39 10y ago

I don't think. but if is so, I am sure unsolicited, spam or inappropriate Traffic which might harmful for our website is prevented by google

romanovcode 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    How is it making the Internet worse for current users?
    - romanovcode 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        > 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.

buckbova 10y ago

> 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.

z3t4 10y ago

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 10y ago
I agree, since that's pretty much what AMP is doing (free cdn/hosting.)

jacquesm 10y ago

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.

coderjames 10y ago
> I would expect an un-biased search engine to rate pages with and without AMP equal Well there's your problem :-). Google isn't an unbiased search engine, they're a commercial entity with a financial interest in feeding you particular search results. They're absolutely going to be biased in the results they provide you.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
  They also have near-monopoly status on search, so they must not be anticompetitive.
  - leereeves 10y ago
    But it will take years for the government to do anything about it. Longer, perhaps, if Hillary is elected with Eric Schmidt's help.[1] 1: http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working-for-hillary-clinton-campaign/ http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working...
    - geofft 10y ago
      Why do you think that "person X supports candidate Y" implies "candidate Y will help person X commit more crimes without penalty"? Is that true of all people and all candidates, or only some?

dkersten 10y ago

> 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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
ryandrake 10y ago

emilssolmanis 10y ago

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 10y ago
Your comment is very similar to victim blaming.

frandroid 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.

shortformblog 10y ago

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.)

tonmoy 10y ago

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.

AJ007 10y ago

"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 10y ago
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.
- state_less 10y ago
  Therein lies the problem, Google owns 80% of the market. Google is a de-facto monopoly. They can force you to act against your long term interests for a short term gain. I personally find the gain suspicious, it's already possible to make fast pages. Soon, we'll all merely be Google content providers.

wtbob 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Did you click the support first-viewport preloading link?
  - boto3 10y ago
    embrace, extend and extinguish

bandrami 10y ago

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

nashashmi 10y ago

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 10y ago
long press on link and click open in new tab on search
- nashashmi 10y ago
  thanks. but it doesn't work.

freyir 10y ago

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.

adjwilli 10y ago

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.

ggggtez 10y ago

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.

Otto42 10y ago

"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.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

remremz 10y ago

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.

emodendroket 10y ago

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

Pxtl 10y ago

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.

MyMan1 10y ago

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

disruptalot 10y ago
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?

Mikho 10y ago

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 10y ago
I wish they would kill it, personally. It makes sites feel and act weird different.

akras14 10y ago

A tech lead from Google wrote his response, if anybody is interested: https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile-traffic/#comment-55336 https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile-...

cramforce 10y ago

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.

manigandham 10y ago

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.

brainfire 10y ago

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.

VOYD 10y ago

"may be"?