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This is a good response and I appreciate Malte's effort to engage publishers, but it doesn't calm my nerves about the biggest publisher complaint about AMP: Go

This is a good response and I appreciate Malte's effort to engage publishers, but it doesn't calm my nerves about the biggest publisher complaint about AMP: Google owns the chrome (top navigation) on all AMP pages. This makes it easy to navigate back to Google (why would you ever want to leave?) and other publishers in the AMP ecosystem, but much harder to navigate to the publisher that created the page in the first place In essence, this means that what was once a publisher-owned page is now shared property: between the Google and the publisher. By controlling the top navigation, Google more easily controls the content the visitor sees, keeps visitors on Google longer, provides greater opportunity to track visitors, and perhaps most importantly has the opportunity to earn more ad revenue. Now imagine if this was a requirement for ALL pages served in Google search results. You publish a page and it appears in Google, but when the user clicks on it Google has pasted a new navigation on the top of your page. This is exactly what is happening with AMP. This is especially troubling in light of all the anti-trust controversies Google is finding itself in, both in the US and abroad. A recent study showed that 49% of all Google clicks go to Google properties of one kind or another (Maps, YouTube, Ads, etc) http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/intro-to-mozcon-2016/24-Lots_of_NoClick_Searches_in http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/intro-to-mozcon-2016/24-L... Does AMP count as another Google property that will push more than 49% of clicks their way? Hard to say, but it's a disturbing trend for a monopoly and a hard pill for publishers to swallow.

MarkMc 10y ago
> This makes it ... much harder to navigate to the publisher that created the page in the first place What makes it hard? People click on links to navigate around the publisher's web site, and you can still have links in the AMP landing page.
- cyrusshepard 10y ago
  All these navigation elements are secondary, and further down the page. You have a point that if the user wants to, they are free to click any link they want. The fact remains that the top-most, primary navigation element on an AMP page is an "X" that closes you out of the publisher's page to send you back to Google. After that, the second most prominent navigation element invites you to browse other publishers. By design, the publisher's own links must come after these two elements.
  - mr_luc 10y ago
    Yeah - that's really, really shocking to me. I paid attention to the AMP project early on, felt like I had absorbed its value proposition, and made a mental note to check on it from time to time. I wasn't expecting the examples of its usage to involve altering the UI on AMP pages! Is it just part of the blessed AMP WordPress plugin? Or is google actually injecting their own UI into AMP pages by default? If the latter, that would seem like a power grab. Sure, it's "just a toolbar." And search results and adwords ads are "just links."
    - kuschku 10y ago
      > Or is google actually injecting their own UI into AMP pages by default? Yes. Google doesn’t actually link to AMP articles, but caches them on their own servers, modifies the markup, or removes non-compliant ad networks, and serves that to the actual user.
      - mr_luc 10y ago
        Oh. Wow. The web is supposed to be a platform, and AMP is supposed to be an open standard ... but the end result of this is that Google Search will modify your web application with their own navigation UI? Yikes. I mean, injecting your stuff into other people's web pages is bad when a cable provider uses it for ads. Is it not bad for the web platform if it's google that does it? Or is it linked to your usage of their CDN, and not something that necessarily comes with being an AMP site? (Ie, google will cache it for you, but first you have to agree to let them inject your page). That wouldn't be so bad, because it'd mean that you could play in the AMP playground without agreeing to Google having their fingers in your users' navigation. But if AMP means "Google-injected UI" right now, then that just seems bad.
        kuschku 10y ago
        You can have AMP without Google-injected UI, but only if you rename it, or don’t allow Google to index your page at all. If Google indexes a page with AMP, and returns is at as a search result, it NEVER actually returns the AMP page, but always the modified one from the cache.
waqf 10y ago
As of now it's not a requirement, so I'm not sure how your hypothetical is relevant.
- zaroth 10y ago
  It is a requirement for certain placement; such as the high ranking top-level news carousel.
polemic 10y ago
This matches my own experience using AMP via google search. As a _user_ the experience is excellent but it pushes me toward using content in a very shallow way. If I were a content _publisher_ I would be thinking very carefully about the cost this has on retention.
spullara 10y ago
it exists for normal web pages and is actually named Chrome.
wmf 10y ago
The extra chrome appears to be displayed in browsers but not in the Google app. On Android it's more natural to search from the app; I don't know what the situation is like on iOS. I still don't understand why it's mandatory to use the Google CDN, but I probably don't want to know.
- yoz-y 10y ago
  According to AMP documentation anybody can build an amp cache. But probably nobody did so yet. Also google will most probably link only their cache from the results. But it seems possible that you could build an AMP CMS that would use the advantages only for you, although I do not see much interest over well written HTML.
  - xg15 10y ago
    I agree. You'd have fast-loading pages - but you can get that by just writing decent HTML. What you likely won't get is Google's preferred handling in search results. The one upside I see is that Google-moderated AMP pages might push ad networks and library developers to develop less bloaty solutions to stay compliant. Those solutions might make it easier to develop regular non-bloaty pages as well.
    - yoz-y 10y ago
      I think that it is easier to develop a non bloated page even today. But the problem is that the competition got extremely fierce and the ad networks absurdly data obsessed (without much proof that the targeting works). I wonder whether we can get to a sane level now. Consumers do not seem to be prioritising sites with less bloat (otherwise there would already be a trend for leaner pages). Those who care probably use ad blockers and aren't the target demographic anyway.
mintplant 10y ago
It's one more step along Google's path to eating the internet. Google-served content discovered through Google search rendered in Google's browser running on Google's operating system on a Google-manufactured device connected through Google's ISP and Google's network protocol (QUIC). Vertical integration.
- visarga 10y ago
  Google is just sending a different type of traffic: "one page traffic", but let's not forget that it is Google that is sending the traffic to AMP pages in the first place, there should be no entitlement on the part of webmasters.
  - sdoering 10y ago
    What would Google be able to show it's user if it weren't for this greedy webmasters who poured over their sites to generate content? What comes first? Hen or egg? Google isn't the internet, the web was there long before Google made things findable. You had to know how and where to look. And yes Google made things back then way better. Non the less without content on the web a search engine is just blank. Unnecessary imho. So Google making my content a shared property is something of concern to me. Therefore I am not using AMP.
    - strictnein 10y ago
      Well, the hen and the egg came first. The egg (the content) was there and the hen (Yahoo) was already making it all findable.
  - gcb0 10y ago
    I'm only half sure you're trolling so I will point out for others that lost what I hope was your irony and not naivete: Google only exist because content creators allow their bots to index and display part of the often copyrighted content for Google's own monetary gain, so Google should feel no entitlement on owning anything on the Internet.
FT_intern 10y ago
To be fair, the user coming from a search engine is most likely to want to navigate back to Google than to stay on the page. It might not be benevolent but it is an improvement to the user experience of most people.
- nostromo 10y ago
  That's why we have back buttons, no?
  - Jaruzel 10y ago
    Most (if not all) default browsers on mobile, auto scroll/hide the navigation bar off the display after a few seconds. For most non-techie users this means it's 'gone'. Ergo, they have no back button anymore. I've watched many people just open/shut/open/shut their mobile browser just to get back to previous pages - in many cases even re-searching the same query over and over again. This is modus operandi for many users, hence why Google inserting a big 'go back to Google' banner at the top, is a bad[1] thing. -- [1] Or from the standard user point of view, a good thing.
    - crucialfelix 10y ago
      On Samsung Android the back button (↩) is always on the bottom right of the device (below the screen) For the browser that is back, and if you opened the page in a new window then back means close it and reveal the previous page. Maybe not everybody realizes that and uses it. I didn't at first but now it's a happy habit.
    - majewsky 10y ago
      But this is just an iOS thing, right? Android has either a hardware back button, or a software back button that's always shown (except for fullscreen apps, such as Youtube and games).
      - cbraz 10y ago
        Software buttons hide when using full screen apps and can be made visible again by a swipe from the bottom.
tmarthal 10y ago
I wonder if AMP isn't just an open source/mobile friendly version of StumbleUpon. Not sure if anyone remembers those SU banners at the top of most blogs, trying to get more in-site clicks from deep linked articles.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
inimino 10y ago
If you aren't comfortable with it, just don't use it, right? I'm probably missing something, but I don't understand how something can be such a hard pill to swallow when it is opt-in.
- lelandbatey 10y ago
  Because those that do not opt in will be implicitly penalized by users trained to prefer AMP pages, whether that preference is warranted or not.
- ef4 10y ago
  AMP content shows up before other organic search results. So it's not really optional unless you want to lose all your search-driven traffic.
  - rakoo 10y ago
    The guy said AMP doesn't influence ranking. Who do we have to believe ?
    - Semaphor 10y ago
      It doesn't influence ranking. It shows up at the top in the carousel.
    - elsewhen 10y ago
      it may not be a direct ranking signal but i think this is a little disingenuous. by putting this "lighting" icon next to some results, the CTR (click through rate) on the SERPS (search engine results pages), will likely be higher for AMP pages, and that higher CTR _is_ a direct ranking signal which will eventually lead to better rankings.
    - elsewhen 10y ago
      that is for organic results, but the AMP news carousel _does_ appear at the top of the search results pages.
  - 10y ago
IanCal 10y ago
The top navigation, from a search on android, is almost the same between an amp page and a non amp page. The only difference is the text says "from ..." rather than just the site.
spiderfarmer 10y ago
Google owns all the Chrome on Image Search too. And that didn't stop them from hotlinking to the images on your server. There's no way Google is backtracking on this because of the content owner's concerns. Maybe they'll make an exception for Germany and France, where the old image search is still live.
- user5994461 10y ago
  FYI: It's long dead in France.
antocv 10y ago
Ill jump on the top post for now, and recommend everyone to use Yandex Search. Yes that is right. Not duckduckgo, because that one is anyway using Google in its backend. Yandex is surprisingly good, take some time to try it out, whenever you think "oh shit results" and want to switch back to Google search, remind yourself how often you automatically rephrase your search when you dont find anything on Google either. Rephrase search, try again, you will find better results than what you had with Google. There is less spam/ads, and you will discover whole new websites, and network of websites, some even foreign sites but in English. It feels like using Google from 2004. www.yandex.com and no Im not payed by them.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  I don't think DuckDuckGo is using Google. https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.
  - antocv 10y ago
    Oh that is nice, was not the case last time I checked duck. Still, duckduckgo is an US company, better stay away from those given the history of last decade.
    - laurent123456 10y ago
      So better go with Yandex, the Russian company?
      - kuschku 10y ago
        Yes, if there’s multiple international companies competing, that’s better than one (even if it might be morally good) company having a monopoly.
jacquesm 10y ago
There were some search engines that displayed their results in an iframe rather than by going to the link directly. This was a very bad move and angered users tremendously. It's interesting to see how Google is trying to revive this concept through the backdoor of providing the user with a faster loading page. What with mobile being set to be a larger portion of visitors to websites at some point in the future this makes Google effectively the only real website on their view of the web and the rest of us chickens as information providers to Google, to be terminated at will.
- patmcguire 10y ago
  Digg tried the same thing, back when Digg was a thing. It didn't go over well, but they didn't have nearly the same power that Google does.

MarkMc 10y ago

> This makes it ... much harder to navigate to the publisher that created the page in the first place What makes it hard? People click on links to navigate around the publisher's web site, and you can still have links in the AMP landing page.

cyrusshepard 10y ago
All these navigation elements are secondary, and further down the page. You have a point that if the user wants to, they are free to click any link they want. The fact remains that the top-most, primary navigation element on an AMP page is an "X" that closes you out of the publisher's page to send you back to Google. After that, the second most prominent navigation element invites you to browse other publishers. By design, the publisher's own links must come after these two elements.
- mr_luc 10y ago
  Yeah - that's really, really shocking to me. I paid attention to the AMP project early on, felt like I had absorbed its value proposition, and made a mental note to check on it from time to time. I wasn't expecting the examples of its usage to involve altering the UI on AMP pages! Is it just part of the blessed AMP WordPress plugin? Or is google actually injecting their own UI into AMP pages by default? If the latter, that would seem like a power grab. Sure, it's "just a toolbar." And search results and adwords ads are "just links."
  - kuschku 10y ago
    > Or is google actually injecting their own UI into AMP pages by default? Yes. Google doesn’t actually link to AMP articles, but caches them on their own servers, modifies the markup, or removes non-compliant ad networks, and serves that to the actual user.
    - mr_luc 10y ago
      Oh. Wow. The web is supposed to be a platform, and AMP is supposed to be an open standard ... but the end result of this is that Google Search will modify your web application with their own navigation UI? Yikes. I mean, injecting your stuff into other people's web pages is bad when a cable provider uses it for ads. Is it not bad for the web platform if it's google that does it? Or is it linked to your usage of their CDN, and not something that necessarily comes with being an AMP site? (Ie, google will cache it for you, but first you have to agree to let them inject your page). That wouldn't be so bad, because it'd mean that you could play in the AMP playground without agreeing to Google having their fingers in your users' navigation. But if AMP means "Google-injected UI" right now, then that just seems bad.
      - kuschku 10y ago
        You can have AMP without Google-injected UI, but only if you rename it, or don’t allow Google to index your page at all. If Google indexes a page with AMP, and returns is at as a search result, it NEVER actually returns the AMP page, but always the modified one from the cache.

waqf 10y ago

As of now it's not a requirement, so I'm not sure how your hypothetical is relevant.

zaroth 10y ago
It is a requirement for certain placement; such as the high ranking top-level news carousel.

polemic 10y ago

This matches my own experience using AMP via google search. As a _user_ the experience is excellent but it pushes me toward using content in a very shallow way. If I were a content _publisher_ I would be thinking very carefully about the cost this has on retention.

spullara 10y ago

it exists for normal web pages and is actually named Chrome.

wmf 10y ago

The extra chrome appears to be displayed in browsers but not in the Google app. On Android it's more natural to search from the app; I don't know what the situation is like on iOS. I still don't understand why it's mandatory to use the Google CDN, but I probably don't want to know.

yoz-y 10y ago
According to AMP documentation anybody can build an amp cache. But probably nobody did so yet. Also google will most probably link only their cache from the results. But it seems possible that you could build an AMP CMS that would use the advantages only for you, although I do not see much interest over well written HTML.
- xg15 10y ago
  I agree. You'd have fast-loading pages - but you can get that by just writing decent HTML. What you likely won't get is Google's preferred handling in search results. The one upside I see is that Google-moderated AMP pages might push ad networks and library developers to develop less bloaty solutions to stay compliant. Those solutions might make it easier to develop regular non-bloaty pages as well.
  - yoz-y 10y ago
    I think that it is easier to develop a non bloated page even today. But the problem is that the competition got extremely fierce and the ad networks absurdly data obsessed (without much proof that the targeting works). I wonder whether we can get to a sane level now. Consumers do not seem to be prioritising sites with less bloat (otherwise there would already be a trend for leaner pages). Those who care probably use ad blockers and aren't the target demographic anyway.

mintplant 10y ago

It's one more step along Google's path to eating the internet. Google-served content discovered through Google search rendered in Google's browser running on Google's operating system on a Google-manufactured device connected through Google's ISP and Google's network protocol (QUIC). Vertical integration.

visarga 10y ago
Google is just sending a different type of traffic: "one page traffic", but let's not forget that it is Google that is sending the traffic to AMP pages in the first place, there should be no entitlement on the part of webmasters.
- sdoering 10y ago
  What would Google be able to show it's user if it weren't for this greedy webmasters who poured over their sites to generate content? What comes first? Hen or egg? Google isn't the internet, the web was there long before Google made things findable. You had to know how and where to look. And yes Google made things back then way better. Non the less without content on the web a search engine is just blank. Unnecessary imho. So Google making my content a shared property is something of concern to me. Therefore I am not using AMP.
  - strictnein 10y ago
    Well, the hen and the egg came first. The egg (the content) was there and the hen (Yahoo) was already making it all findable.
- gcb0 10y ago
  I'm only half sure you're trolling so I will point out for others that lost what I hope was your irony and not naivete: Google only exist because content creators allow their bots to index and display part of the often copyrighted content for Google's own monetary gain, so Google should feel no entitlement on owning anything on the Internet.

FT_intern 10y ago

To be fair, the user coming from a search engine is most likely to want to navigate back to Google than to stay on the page. It might not be benevolent but it is an improvement to the user experience of most people.

nostromo 10y ago
That's why we have back buttons, no?
- Jaruzel 10y ago
  Most (if not all) default browsers on mobile, auto scroll/hide the navigation bar off the display after a few seconds. For most non-techie users this means it's 'gone'. Ergo, they have no back button anymore. I've watched many people just open/shut/open/shut their mobile browser just to get back to previous pages - in many cases even re-searching the same query over and over again. This is modus operandi for many users, hence why Google inserting a big 'go back to Google' banner at the top, is a bad[1] thing. -- [1] Or from the standard user point of view, a good thing.
  - crucialfelix 10y ago
    On Samsung Android the back button (↩) is always on the bottom right of the device (below the screen) For the browser that is back, and if you opened the page in a new window then back means close it and reveal the previous page. Maybe not everybody realizes that and uses it. I didn't at first but now it's a happy habit.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    But this is just an iOS thing, right? Android has either a hardware back button, or a software back button that's always shown (except for fullscreen apps, such as Youtube and games).
    - cbraz 10y ago
      Software buttons hide when using full screen apps and can be made visible again by a swipe from the bottom.

tmarthal 10y ago

I wonder if AMP isn't just an open source/mobile friendly version of StumbleUpon. Not sure if anyone remembers those SU banners at the top of most blogs, trying to get more in-site clicks from deep linked articles.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

inimino 10y ago

If you aren't comfortable with it, just don't use it, right? I'm probably missing something, but I don't understand how something can be such a hard pill to swallow when it is opt-in.

lelandbatey 10y ago
Because those that do not opt in will be implicitly penalized by users trained to prefer AMP pages, whether that preference is warranted or not.
ef4 10y ago
AMP content shows up before other organic search results. So it's not really optional unless you want to lose all your search-driven traffic.
- rakoo 10y ago
  The guy said AMP doesn't influence ranking. Who do we have to believe ?
  - Semaphor 10y ago
    It doesn't influence ranking. It shows up at the top in the carousel.
  - elsewhen 10y ago
    it may not be a direct ranking signal but i think this is a little disingenuous. by putting this "lighting" icon next to some results, the CTR (click through rate) on the SERPS (search engine results pages), will likely be higher for AMP pages, and that higher CTR _is_ a direct ranking signal which will eventually lead to better rankings.
  - elsewhen 10y ago
    that is for organic results, but the AMP news carousel _does_ appear at the top of the search results pages.
- 10y ago

IanCal 10y ago

The top navigation, from a search on android, is almost the same between an amp page and a non amp page. The only difference is the text says "from ..." rather than just the site.

spiderfarmer 10y ago

Google owns all the Chrome on Image Search too. And that didn't stop them from hotlinking to the images on your server. There's no way Google is backtracking on this because of the content owner's concerns. Maybe they'll make an exception for Germany and France, where the old image search is still live.

user5994461 10y ago
FYI: It's long dead in France.

antocv 10y ago

Ill jump on the top post for now, and recommend everyone to use Yandex Search. Yes that is right. Not duckduckgo, because that one is anyway using Google in its backend. Yandex is surprisingly good, take some time to try it out, whenever you think "oh shit results" and want to switch back to Google search, remind yourself how often you automatically rephrase your search when you dont find anything on Google either. Rephrase search, try again, you will find better results than what you had with Google. There is less spam/ads, and you will discover whole new websites, and network of websites, some even foreign sites but in English. It feels like using Google from 2004. www.yandex.com and no Im not payed by them.

maxerickson 10y ago
I don't think DuckDuckGo is using Google. https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.
- antocv 10y ago
  Oh that is nice, was not the case last time I checked duck. Still, duckduckgo is an US company, better stay away from those given the history of last decade.
  - laurent123456 10y ago
    So better go with Yandex, the Russian company?
    - kuschku 10y ago
      Yes, if there’s multiple international companies competing, that’s better than one (even if it might be morally good) company having a monopoly.

jacquesm 10y ago

There were some search engines that displayed their results in an iframe rather than by going to the link directly. This was a very bad move and angered users tremendously. It's interesting to see how Google is trying to revive this concept through the backdoor of providing the user with a faster loading page. What with mobile being set to be a larger portion of visitors to websites at some point in the future this makes Google effectively the only real website on their view of the web and the rest of us chickens as information providers to Google, to be terminated at will.

patmcguire 10y ago
Digg tried the same thing, back when Digg was a thing. It didn't go over well, but they didn't have nearly the same power that Google does.