13 ms·

Google fixes a problem with AMP, lets you view and share publisher’s own links

263 points by gdeglin 10y ago

kyrra 10y ago
Seems like it may be better to link to the Google blog post on this? https://developers.googleblog.com/2017/02/whats-in-amp-url.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2017/02/whats-in-amp-url.h...
akras14 10y ago
>However, there has been some misunderstanding about how AMP works. One widely circulated blog post written back in October claimed Google was stealing traffic from publishers via its AMP pages. I am really happy to see this change, as the author of said blog post :) > But that wasn’t true. Google does display the AMP URL in the search results, which serves up the page content from Google’s cache, but the traffic remains the publisher’s, and the content is served from the publisher’s site. So which one is it? Does it server content from Google cache or from publisher's site ;) Link to the original blog post: https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile-traffic/ https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile-...
- ucaetano 10y ago
  They are confusing two different meanings of traffic: - Advertising: where is the user coming from - Networking: where is the data being served from So my guess is that people were worried that Google would steal the advertising traffic and, therefore, revenue.
  - dgfgfdagasdfgfa 10y ago
    That's definitely how Google is acting. Most of the negative feedback I've heard is because it makes it very difficult to bypass amp on mobile (impossible?) and, yes, copy the URL of a google result without linking to google.
  - freehunter 10y ago
    So if I have AMP on my site and a user clicks an AMP link, does my web server record a hit? That's what I care about, since I use traffic stats to negotiate deals with sponsors. I don't run third-party (even Google) ads on my site, it's all native "sponsored content", so making sure traffic is recording correctly is pretty important to me. The first question I hear when I start a conversation about a sponsorship is "how many hits did you have last month" and the second question is usually "how many hits do your sponsored posts usually get?". I need to be able to answer those questions, and prove it too.
    - wmf 10y ago
      Server-side logs are extremely uncool; you need to use JS to record analytics these days (even if the JS just does a POST to your own server).
    - kuschku 10y ago
      > So if I have AMP on my site and a user clicks an AMP link, does my web server record a hit? That can be very easily answered with "no". This is intentional in this design, for faster loads.
      - throwaway91111 10y ago
        Defective by design sure rings a bell....
    - ehsankia 10y ago
      The server itself doesn't (you don't get extra load), but analytics is forwarded to you. So you can still get the numbers you need to convince the higher ups, just not directly from your server logs.
      - epistasis 10y ago
        At first my distaste for AMP has been as a user: broken inertial scrolling, wasted space, and broken links. But as I learn about it AMP becomes even more distasteful. Waiting for an intermediary to forward analytics to you is horrific. What's going on at Google these days? Everything about AMP sounds like a bald-faced attempt to destroy the web. At every point there are horribly unjustified architectural decisions that hurt the web but also help Google.
- leereeves 10y ago
  > Does it server content from Google cache or from publisher's site ;) Or does it serve part from Google's cache and part from the publisher's site? For example, it might serve page text and images from Google's cache but serve ads from the publisher's ad network.
  - ChuckMcM 10y ago
    Since the #1 cause of latency I experience is waiting for ads to be fetched from a publisher's ad network, I'm pretty sure AMP would not work at all if it worked this way.
    - cramforce 10y ago
      AMP only starts loading ads after the content loaded anyway. Ads can be served from the publisher's server, but this is rarely done.
- dreamfactory2 10y ago
  it's all so oddly and guardedly worded it looks like it was drafted by lawyers or a north korean tourist guide
- superkuh 10y ago
  I received the same sort of self contradicting response from Cloudflare. Their AMP bot mirrors and rehosts any pages one of their subscribers with AMP enabled links to. And their FAQ is so badly written it seems like english may have been their second language: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000635308-Accelerated-Mobile-Links https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/11500063530... >Will Accelerated Mobile Links if the AMP links are pointing to content publishers who are not part of Cloudflare customers? >Yes. Only the discovery site (the website that has the links to AMP content) needs to be a Cloudflare customer. When I saw their AMP-bot in my server logs I emailed them about this. 2 weeks later I finally managed to talk to a human. That was about 4 days ago and they still haven't responded. If you're not a Cloudflare customer they don't care that they're re-hosting and serving your content.
  - x0x0 10y ago
    robots.txt and dmca seems appropriate
    - DanBC 10y ago
      Doesn't DMCA have specific exemptions around caching.
      - x0x0 10y ago
        my understanding is possibly, but not in violation of robots.txt
    - superkuh 10y ago
      Yeah. After I saw the bot I added it to my robots.txt and I blocked all of Cloudflare's IP ranges to the server. But the bot had already come and gone. And the email I'm waiting back on from Cloudflare is about what to put in the robots.txt since it's not on the FAQ page. As of right now I'm trying, User-agent: Cloudflare-AMP Disallow: /
- sly010 10y ago
  > but the traffic remains the publisher’s I bet "traffic" here means clicks counted by AdSense, so you still have to pay for a click even if the user never really visited your website ;) In any case, google is just trying to copy Facebook Instant Articles here. They want people to stay within the walls, because they realized they make more money that way.
  - zardeh 10y ago
    >so you still have to pay for a click even if the user never really visited your website Don't you mean so you get paid for a click even if the user never visited your website?
    - sly010 10y ago
      I meant AdWords. But I guess both.
      - zardeh 10y ago
        That makes me even more curious: what is the market share of adwords things (my understanding this is mostly going to be people offering services) that is impacted by AMP? An ecommerce site won't support AMP so won't be affected, and are news sites and blogs going to be using adwords to advertise their news and blog offerings that much? E: (and then does it even matter if you're ads are still shown on your AMPed site so you get paid per hit?)
- lllr_finger 10y ago
  Yes. My understanding from conversations with those in the know, and our limited testing at AMP launch, is that you treat the CDN as a proxy. All the downsides of losing visibility to your domain and none of the upside from offloading traffic. That being said, we did notice some single digit percentage traffic bumps when we rolled out AMP, and it felt really good telling the hordes of product/business people that I literally couldn't add the dozens of analytics scripts they wanted.
maaaats 10y ago
So basically they just add a button on the already obnoxious banner on top of the page? This article also claims that the speedup is partly due to loading the content in a hidden iframe on the search results page. So it's potentially using more data in order to be perceived faster?
- cramforce 10y ago
  Only data in the first viewport is loaded during pre-rendering phase.
  - catshirt 10y ago
    are you saying that google proxies and loads data based on the screen resolution of the client? that's actually pretty awesome.
    - chinathrow 10y ago
      AMP requires to include some JS and to use the Google AMP cache. Essentially, your content runs in a web app largely controlled by Google.
the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
Nothing really changes. The URL in the bar is still from the cache.
- chickenfries 10y ago
  Exactly, all they did was add a link underneath the "..." menu to see the canonical URL. Apparently, the whole justification for the Cache is that smaller websites don't have CDNs or developer resources or something? > For a small site, however, that doesn't manage its own DNS entries, doesn't have engineering resources to push content through complicated APIs, or can't pay for content delivery networks, a lot of these technologies are inaccessible. https://developers.googleblog.com/2017/02/whats-in-amp-url.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2017/02/whats-in-amp-url.h... However, I work for a publisher that delivers almost all our assets through a CDN, over https, etc... we don't really need our pages to be served through the AMP Cache, we could support users visiting the AMP version of our articles on our site, and hopefully get more second-page visits. I don't get it, who is AMP really for, big publishers or small publishers? If I am already a performance-minded developer, I don't need any of the things AMP provides, but I am forced to implement it for the magic google juice.
  - ucaetano 10y ago
    > I don't get it, who is AMP really for, big publishers or small publishers? For the users. When looking at search results on mobile I usually go for the AMP ones, regular results take way too long to load.
    - Aaargh20318 10y ago
      Really ? I avoid them like the plague. I switched to DDG just to be rid of them. I want the full webpage, not some gimped mobile version.
      - ucaetano 10y ago
        And if most users are like you, I'm sure Google's internal metrics will show that and they will discontinue the format. But I'd be willing to bet that most users are like me, but I have no data besides the fact the Google seems to be doubling down on it.
tyingq 10y ago
"One widely circulated blog post written back in October claimed Google was stealing traffic from publishers via its AMP pages. But that wasn’t true." I suspect the writer didn't really look into what the publishers were saying. AMP shoved a UI element at the top of your content that, when you interact with it, goes back to Google. End users already know how to use a back button. So, adding another one, without being clear about what it was, would certainly create more traffic to google, and fewer "second pageviews" of your content/site. Google knows that the top portion of the page is the most valuable.
liveoneggs 10y ago
ios scrolling seems a little better now, but maybe I'm just getting used to it?
- cramforce 10y ago
  WebKit bug to follow on scrolling inertia being different for overflowed elements from the main scroller https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162499 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162499
kuschku 10y ago
This entire AMP project is already workaround after workaround, but this gets even worse. All that would have been required to solve these problems would have been a simple standard for lightweight pages that anyone could implement, and a better ranking for any complying page. Google could offer the cache optionally, or sites could do their own stuff. Then, the entire rendering and preload problems could have been improved with a simple JS api to allow for exactly that. Then none of the rest would have had to be solved, we’d get none of Google’s increased dominance over the web, and we wouldn’t have to put up with thousands of AMP pages loading slower than normal pages (because they bundle fucktons of useless JS) for the sake of improving the loadtimes of a handful of sites.
- Ajedi32 10y ago
  > All that would have been required to solve these problems would have been a simple standard for lightweight pages that anyone could implement FWIW that's exactly what AMP is. It's not a W3C standard, but a standard nonetheless: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/create/basic_markup https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/create/basic_mar...
  - taylorbuley 10y ago
    I'd love them to standardize the serving aspects, in addition to the formatting aspects. Changes like these seem somewhat arbitrary but yet impact everything end-to-end.
  - rocqua 10y ago
    AMP is more though. Or if you want to define AMP narrowly, google does a lot more with AMP than just the standard.
  - callahad 10y ago
    AMP is not a standard. It is a Google product with developer documentation, but that documentation does not make it a standard any moreso that Twitter having an API makes it a standard. AMP allows your websites to rank better / more prominently within Google and Bing, but it comes at the cost of ceding control of markup itself to Google. A truly open standard would not have hard dependencies on a single for-profit corporation.
jannyfer 10y ago
I like the TechCrunch title better ("Google fixes a big problem with AMP"). "Google fixes problem with AMP" makes it sound like there's only one problem with AMP.
mrcactu5 10y ago
as an end-user, I was suspicious of AMP because it changed the websites slightly and didn't let me share the URL. now I see there are legal (intellectual property) reasons why that is wrong as well.
tdkl 10y ago
In other news, mobile Chrome 57 Beta on Android brought ability to change search engines as you visit appropriate sites (same as on desktop). Switched to Duckduckgo.
macandcheese 10y ago
So, I still need to take an extra step to view the original link and then click again to visit it. Why not just make the entire top banner a clickable link to the source article? My browser already shows the title of the page separately. The whole AMP / SERP interaction is such a headache. They already insist on us having structured page content to source previews from, the last thing I want to do is write more quasi-semantic markup that just repeats what my original source code already states. Get out of my way Google.
- wmf 10y ago
  Why do you want to visit the original page? It looks the same or worse than the AMP version that already loaded.
  - chickenfries 10y ago
    To share the original link, to read more posts by the author, to visit the publication's home page to see what else they publish, to use their comments section which is not yet supported by AMP...
    - ehsankia 10y ago
      Do you share links before visiting the article? With this change, it seems like sharing the link will be the same amount of clicks. Same goes for reading more about the author. How often do you do that, and do you do it before you even read the article? For visiting the homepage, almost every AMP page I go to these days as a big logo at the top linking to their (real) homepage, so there's 0 difference for the user. The only valid one is comment section. I just tried a few articles, and they seem to have a button which redirects to the real website. I think that's a fair compromise. Honestly most article sites do this anyway, load the comments after a click.
      - chickenfries 10y ago
        > Do you share links before visiting the article? Absolutely, for example if I've read the story before and I'm just googling it now to reference it. Furthermore, I care not that it is the same number of clicks, I care that users can access my website in a way that conforms to their expectations for the rest of the web. That's the crux of my problem with AMP. If it was everything except the page cache it would a lot better.
Yokohiii 10y ago
AMP is really ridiculous. I tried a top article from mobile.nytimes.com via AMP (google link) and direct link. The AMP version takes more than 3 times longer to render above the fold with a 3g regular throttling and cold caches, while the direct link was done in <2s. Chrome doesn't even record enough frames to show when the above the fold content is visible. With warm caches the render performance difference is roughly the same. Wasn't AMP ment to help with that? Superior client side rendering and top notch caching?
- alexbecker 10y ago
  Are you using an adblocker? If so, does the adblocker successfully block ads for both the AMP and non-AMP page?
  - angry-hacker 10y ago
    If you whitelist Google, it does not block ads.
- sciurus 10y ago
  Can you share those links? That has not been my experience.
fluxem 10y ago
AMP was so annoying, I had to switch to Bind on my smartphone, despite inferior results. AMP header takes 10% of screen and it doesn't disappear when you scroll down No comments section on AMP versions or on Reddit comments are not expendable Hard to get real URL to bookmark or share Request desktop option is completely broken on news.google.com
awinder 10y ago
"It also has under development a Web Share API that would allow AMP viewers to pull the original URL into the native sharing flow on the platform, instead of the AMP Viewer URL." Holy Moly, this is a huge amount of rigamarole just to support a degraded experience that helps ONE company do ONE thing in order to make further lock-in and profits in ONE way. It's hard to believe that any company would ever invest this amount of technical effort on a flawed product offering -- unless of course, it was one company with enough damned vertical integration to make it possibly worth their while.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  > a degraded experience I like AMP over publishers' own formats, which I have to put into Reader mode to make, well, pleasantly readable. I don't like AMP's implications. But I don't think your rendering is fair.
  - pdog 10y ago
    > I like AMP over publishers' own formats... Back in the day, we called them websites.
    - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
      And I still visit them! POLITICO, The Information and others have me at their sites every day. Other publications, e.g. the Washington Post or Wall Street Journal have me Googling for AMP versions. Note that my main search engine is Duck Duck Go. For me, Google's doing something meaningfully helpful with AMP.
      - vonklaus 10y ago
        I use ddg for search. I like it but it is a hassle to have to toggle safe mode every time. I wish they had a url/alternative to toggle this literally every browser load.
        10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
homero 10y ago
AMP needs to die
wyager 10y ago
AMP is literally the most user-unfriendly thing I have seen on the internet in years. It's like an exaggerated example of an aggressively awful UX antipattern. It's what finally caused me to switch to DuckDuckGo on my phone. Sucks that the results aren't nearly as topical as Google's for most searches.
acqq 10y ago
Even the famous Podesta e-mail hack was made possible thanks to the... Google AMP page server policies! See the picture(1) here: https://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/38680/1476913065736588.png https://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-images/contentim... Unless you knew that google.com made their main domain redirect to anything(!) to provide amp, you'd really believe that the click was going to end up on the google.com servers, the place where your login data for Google services really is. Instead, google.com was used as the least expected redirector of them all. It was known among the security people: http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2016/Apr/70 http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2016/Apr/70 But google at that time kept it being a fully invisible redirector. Their explanation then: they "do not consider open redirects to be a security issue." They also wrote: "we generally hold that a small number of properly monitored redirectors offers fairly clear benefits and poses very little practical risk." Benefits for whom but Google? And what was proper then in this Podesta redirect? It seems they now finally changed the handling of the redirection, adding "The previous page is sending you to ..." instead of doing it invisibly. It took the Podesta e-mail hack, possibly changing who's gotten to be a US president, and some time to go by for them to add that change. That's the untold story of who, how, and for which goals influenced the election (Google, Amp, as the unexpected effect of the profit goals of spreading amp as much as possible). Apparently the aide of Podesta later claimed to have made a typo: "When the phishing email first arrived, Podesta referred it to a number of aides. An aide named Charles Delavan replied, “This is a legitimate email"" "Delavan says he had meant to write “illegitimate email,” and simply mistyped." Or maybe it really looked legitimate to him at that moment: the server behind the link was obviously google.com. Who didn't carefully follow what Google did with amp couldn't possibly guess that the main google.com domain just became an invisible redirector thanks to amp. ---- 1) The picture is from the following article: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-hackers-broke-into-john-podesta-and-colin-powells-gmail-accounts https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-hackers-broke...
- xigency 10y ago
  What's also amazing is that this specific Google vulnerability was disclosed to Google and discussed on this website before that leak.
aruggirello 10y ago
tl;dr: it took a little more than two decades to give us the incredible power of HTML5, CSS3 and modern JavaScript; it took countless hours for the W3C to define the standards, and years of browser wars to get this far with compliance. But Google wants us to abandon them in favor of its thing (because, you know, some websites actually suck). Now, fixed...
saycheese 10y ago
All AMP needs to do is add an "X" to the top right corner and if it's clicked ask the user if they want to opt-out of AMP. Either way, the user get sent to the "native" version of the URL they requested when they click the URL.
amelius 10y ago
Let me introduce CASUVP -- Cooperatively Ad-stripped universally viewable pages. It's a concept, there's no implementation yet. Basically, it's a version of the web where users cooperatively clean up web pages from ads and other unwanted material (e.g. scrollbar-hijacking, user-tracking), so that only the plain text with minimal markup of the article, and images remain. The cleaned-up pages are distributed by torrent or by IPFS, and there is a consensus algorithm to make sure that pages are not tampered with (e.g. by content distributors). Browser plugins help users view and seed the material. Now if only people pick up this idea and implement it...
ComodoHacker 10y ago
“URLs and origins represent, to some extent, trust and ownership of content. When you’re reading a New York Times article, a quick glimpse at the URL gives you a level of trust that what you’re reading represents the voice of the New York Times. Attribution, brand, and ownership are clear.” Oh, Google suddenly acknowledges the value of real URL for the user...
rewrew 10y ago
Publishers just need to not opt-in to AMP. There's really no benefit for them anyhow.
- TD-Linux 10y ago
  AMP pages are prioritized in search results.
technion 10y ago
AMP's v0 is 188K of JavaScript. Google's standard analytics.js is currently 28K. If you're running AMP, the AMP compliant version of the same thing, is 64K. Neither of these block rendering and both of these run largely in the background, yet making it AMP compliant more than doubles whatever code it requires. AMP will make progress when I can use it without actually introducing bloat.
qwrusz 10y ago
I would love to know what is really going on here. I'm admittedly not very technical, but like a prisoner scratching tally marks on the wall each day, I try to keep up on the latest "how tech companies are fucking us over" news of the moment, even though I can't do anything about it. Google is pushing AMP on pages in their search results today. Fine, implemented it like idiots. Happens. But I would not be surprised if in the near future Google comes out with "AMS" "Accelerated Mobile Sites", and forces entire websites into this madness. I get it, "fast, efficient" is always the story. Monopolistic nerves, quasi-TLA control fetishes, and an old-fashioned internet land-grab is the rumor. But that is too simple for this much trouble and expense. A few years ago Google was dealing with SPDY, QUIC, HTTP2, and talking about "fast, efficient" but you know something felt fishy there too and there was a back-room-dealy vibe with more to the story. Anywho, while I would love to know what's going on and I have some guesses, I don't really care anymore. Google is wasting everyone's time with these games. So... Why doesn;t Google just get on with it and host the entire internet? [1] For free. Please correct me but Google is already cacheing the internet. Offering to just host the world will allow them to implement whatever bullshit protocols they were going to do anyway. It would kill off most competitor risk from AWS and whatever Microsoft came out with 9 years late. They can afford it. And they have the space (yottabtye my ass). That's it Google. Just bend us over and host the internet. [1] ok not the entire internet, 99% of it. Doubt they would host the porn for free.
jzl 10y ago
Ha! I complained about this exact problem here a month ago. I'm taking full credit. :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13386243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13386243
- cramforce 10y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! I did, however, announce this change 2 months ago :) https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/794585395056939009 https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/794585395056939009
malikNF 10y ago
best way to fix amp is to........ get rid of it. Stupid annoying feature, couldn't figure out an easy way to disable it, now I am using duckduckgo.
frik 10y ago
How hard is to build a simple HTML5 website with little CSS3 and little to no (vanilla) Javascript. You know a website can be very tiny and fast. Yet people who don't know need Google to market them AMP "technology" to do the same but lock them in, and get full access to analytics data.
LeicaLatte 10y ago
I don't see AMP making it. The invasiveness is classic Google. Up there with Google Plus.

263 points by gdeglin 10y ago

kyrra 10y ago

Seems like it may be better to link to the Google blog post on this? https://developers.googleblog.com/2017/02/whats-in-amp-url.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2017/02/whats-in-amp-url.h...

akras14 10y ago

>However, there has been some misunderstanding about how AMP works. One widely circulated blog post written back in October claimed Google was stealing traffic from publishers via its AMP pages. I am really happy to see this change, as the author of said blog post :) > But that wasn’t true. Google does display the AMP URL in the search results, which serves up the page content from Google’s cache, but the traffic remains the publisher’s, and the content is served from the publisher’s site. So which one is it? Does it server content from Google cache or from publisher's site ;) Link to the original blog post: https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile-traffic/ https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile-...

ucaetano 10y ago
They are confusing two different meanings of traffic: - Advertising: where is the user coming from - Networking: where is the data being served from So my guess is that people were worried that Google would steal the advertising traffic and, therefore, revenue.
- dgfgfdagasdfgfa 10y ago
  That's definitely how Google is acting. Most of the negative feedback I've heard is because it makes it very difficult to bypass amp on mobile (impossible?) and, yes, copy the URL of a google result without linking to google.
- freehunter 10y ago
  So if I have AMP on my site and a user clicks an AMP link, does my web server record a hit? That's what I care about, since I use traffic stats to negotiate deals with sponsors. I don't run third-party (even Google) ads on my site, it's all native "sponsored content", so making sure traffic is recording correctly is pretty important to me. The first question I hear when I start a conversation about a sponsorship is "how many hits did you have last month" and the second question is usually "how many hits do your sponsored posts usually get?". I need to be able to answer those questions, and prove it too.
  - wmf 10y ago
    Server-side logs are extremely uncool; you need to use JS to record analytics these days (even if the JS just does a POST to your own server).
  - kuschku 10y ago
    > So if I have AMP on my site and a user clicks an AMP link, does my web server record a hit? That can be very easily answered with "no". This is intentional in this design, for faster loads.
    - throwaway91111 10y ago
      Defective by design sure rings a bell....
  - ehsankia 10y ago
    The server itself doesn't (you don't get extra load), but analytics is forwarded to you. So you can still get the numbers you need to convince the higher ups, just not directly from your server logs.
    - epistasis 10y ago
      At first my distaste for AMP has been as a user: broken inertial scrolling, wasted space, and broken links. But as I learn about it AMP becomes even more distasteful. Waiting for an intermediary to forward analytics to you is horrific. What's going on at Google these days? Everything about AMP sounds like a bald-faced attempt to destroy the web. At every point there are horribly unjustified architectural decisions that hurt the web but also help Google.
leereeves 10y ago
> Does it server content from Google cache or from publisher's site ;) Or does it serve part from Google's cache and part from the publisher's site? For example, it might serve page text and images from Google's cache but serve ads from the publisher's ad network.
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  Since the #1 cause of latency I experience is waiting for ads to be fetched from a publisher's ad network, I'm pretty sure AMP would not work at all if it worked this way.
  - cramforce 10y ago
    AMP only starts loading ads after the content loaded anyway. Ads can be served from the publisher's server, but this is rarely done.
dreamfactory2 10y ago
it's all so oddly and guardedly worded it looks like it was drafted by lawyers or a north korean tourist guide
superkuh 10y ago
I received the same sort of self contradicting response from Cloudflare. Their AMP bot mirrors and rehosts any pages one of their subscribers with AMP enabled links to. And their FAQ is so badly written it seems like english may have been their second language: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000635308-Accelerated-Mobile-Links https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/11500063530... >Will Accelerated Mobile Links if the AMP links are pointing to content publishers who are not part of Cloudflare customers? >Yes. Only the discovery site (the website that has the links to AMP content) needs to be a Cloudflare customer. When I saw their AMP-bot in my server logs I emailed them about this. 2 weeks later I finally managed to talk to a human. That was about 4 days ago and they still haven't responded. If you're not a Cloudflare customer they don't care that they're re-hosting and serving your content.
- x0x0 10y ago
  robots.txt and dmca seems appropriate
  - DanBC 10y ago
    Doesn't DMCA have specific exemptions around caching.
    - x0x0 10y ago
      my understanding is possibly, but not in violation of robots.txt
  - superkuh 10y ago
    Yeah. After I saw the bot I added it to my robots.txt and I blocked all of Cloudflare's IP ranges to the server. But the bot had already come and gone. And the email I'm waiting back on from Cloudflare is about what to put in the robots.txt since it's not on the FAQ page. As of right now I'm trying, User-agent: Cloudflare-AMP Disallow: /
sly010 10y ago
> but the traffic remains the publisher’s I bet "traffic" here means clicks counted by AdSense, so you still have to pay for a click even if the user never really visited your website ;) In any case, google is just trying to copy Facebook Instant Articles here. They want people to stay within the walls, because they realized they make more money that way.
- zardeh 10y ago
  >so you still have to pay for a click even if the user never really visited your website Don't you mean so you get paid for a click even if the user never visited your website?
  - sly010 10y ago
    I meant AdWords. But I guess both.
    - zardeh 10y ago
      That makes me even more curious: what is the market share of adwords things (my understanding this is mostly going to be people offering services) that is impacted by AMP? An ecommerce site won't support AMP so won't be affected, and are news sites and blogs going to be using adwords to advertise their news and blog offerings that much? E: (and then does it even matter if you're ads are still shown on your AMPed site so you get paid per hit?)
lllr_finger 10y ago
Yes. My understanding from conversations with those in the know, and our limited testing at AMP launch, is that you treat the CDN as a proxy. All the downsides of losing visibility to your domain and none of the upside from offloading traffic. That being said, we did notice some single digit percentage traffic bumps when we rolled out AMP, and it felt really good telling the hordes of product/business people that I literally couldn't add the dozens of analytics scripts they wanted.

maaaats 10y ago

So basically they just add a button on the already obnoxious banner on top of the page? This article also claims that the speedup is partly due to loading the content in a hidden iframe on the search results page. So it's potentially using more data in order to be perceived faster?

cramforce 10y ago
Only data in the first viewport is loaded during pre-rendering phase.
- catshirt 10y ago
  are you saying that google proxies and loads data based on the screen resolution of the client? that's actually pretty awesome.
  - chinathrow 10y ago
    AMP requires to include some JS and to use the Google AMP cache. Essentially, your content runs in a web app largely controlled by Google.

the_mitsuhiko 10y ago

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

chickenfries 10y ago
Exactly, all they did was add a link underneath the "..." menu to see the canonical URL. Apparently, the whole justification for the Cache is that smaller websites don't have CDNs or developer resources or something? > For a small site, however, that doesn't manage its own DNS entries, doesn't have engineering resources to push content through complicated APIs, or can't pay for content delivery networks, a lot of these technologies are inaccessible. https://developers.googleblog.com/2017/02/whats-in-amp-url.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2017/02/whats-in-amp-url.h... However, I work for a publisher that delivers almost all our assets through a CDN, over https, etc... we don't really need our pages to be served through the AMP Cache, we could support users visiting the AMP version of our articles on our site, and hopefully get more second-page visits. I don't get it, who is AMP really for, big publishers or small publishers? If I am already a performance-minded developer, I don't need any of the things AMP provides, but I am forced to implement it for the magic google juice.
- ucaetano 10y ago
  > I don't get it, who is AMP really for, big publishers or small publishers? For the users. When looking at search results on mobile I usually go for the AMP ones, regular results take way too long to load.
  - Aaargh20318 10y ago
    Really ? I avoid them like the plague. I switched to DDG just to be rid of them. I want the full webpage, not some gimped mobile version.
    - ucaetano 10y ago
      And if most users are like you, I'm sure Google's internal metrics will show that and they will discontinue the format. But I'd be willing to bet that most users are like me, but I have no data besides the fact the Google seems to be doubling down on it.

tyingq 10y ago

"One widely circulated blog post written back in October claimed Google was stealing traffic from publishers via its AMP pages. But that wasn’t true." I suspect the writer didn't really look into what the publishers were saying. AMP shoved a UI element at the top of your content that, when you interact with it, goes back to Google. End users already know how to use a back button. So, adding another one, without being clear about what it was, would certainly create more traffic to google, and fewer "second pageviews" of your content/site. Google knows that the top portion of the page is the most valuable.

liveoneggs 10y ago

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

cramforce 10y ago
WebKit bug to follow on scrolling inertia being different for overflowed elements from the main scroller https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162499 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162499

kuschku 10y ago

This entire AMP project is already workaround after workaround, but this gets even worse. All that would have been required to solve these problems would have been a simple standard for lightweight pages that anyone could implement, and a better ranking for any complying page. Google could offer the cache optionally, or sites could do their own stuff. Then, the entire rendering and preload problems could have been improved with a simple JS api to allow for exactly that. Then none of the rest would have had to be solved, we’d get none of Google’s increased dominance over the web, and we wouldn’t have to put up with thousands of AMP pages loading slower than normal pages (because they bundle fucktons of useless JS) for the sake of improving the loadtimes of a handful of sites.

Ajedi32 10y ago
> All that would have been required to solve these problems would have been a simple standard for lightweight pages that anyone could implement FWIW that's exactly what AMP is. It's not a W3C standard, but a standard nonetheless: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/create/basic_markup https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/create/basic_mar...
- taylorbuley 10y ago
  I'd love them to standardize the serving aspects, in addition to the formatting aspects. Changes like these seem somewhat arbitrary but yet impact everything end-to-end.
- rocqua 10y ago
  AMP is more though. Or if you want to define AMP narrowly, google does a lot more with AMP than just the standard.
- callahad 10y ago
  AMP is not a standard. It is a Google product with developer documentation, but that documentation does not make it a standard any moreso that Twitter having an API makes it a standard. AMP allows your websites to rank better / more prominently within Google and Bing, but it comes at the cost of ceding control of markup itself to Google. A truly open standard would not have hard dependencies on a single for-profit corporation.

jannyfer 10y ago

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

mrcactu5 10y ago

as an end-user, I was suspicious of AMP because it changed the websites slightly and didn't let me share the URL. now I see there are legal (intellectual property) reasons why that is wrong as well.

tdkl 10y ago

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

macandcheese 10y ago

So, I still need to take an extra step to view the original link and then click again to visit it. Why not just make the entire top banner a clickable link to the source article? My browser already shows the title of the page separately. The whole AMP / SERP interaction is such a headache. They already insist on us having structured page content to source previews from, the last thing I want to do is write more quasi-semantic markup that just repeats what my original source code already states. Get out of my way Google.

wmf 10y ago
Why do you want to visit the original page? It looks the same or worse than the AMP version that already loaded.
- chickenfries 10y ago
  To share the original link, to read more posts by the author, to visit the publication's home page to see what else they publish, to use their comments section which is not yet supported by AMP...
  - ehsankia 10y ago
    Do you share links before visiting the article? With this change, it seems like sharing the link will be the same amount of clicks. Same goes for reading more about the author. How often do you do that, and do you do it before you even read the article? For visiting the homepage, almost every AMP page I go to these days as a big logo at the top linking to their (real) homepage, so there's 0 difference for the user. The only valid one is comment section. I just tried a few articles, and they seem to have a button which redirects to the real website. I think that's a fair compromise. Honestly most article sites do this anyway, load the comments after a click.
    - chickenfries 10y ago
      > Do you share links before visiting the article? Absolutely, for example if I've read the story before and I'm just googling it now to reference it. Furthermore, I care not that it is the same number of clicks, I care that users can access my website in a way that conforms to their expectations for the rest of the web. That's the crux of my problem with AMP. If it was everything except the page cache it would a lot better.

Yokohiii 10y ago

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

alexbecker 10y ago
Are you using an adblocker? If so, does the adblocker successfully block ads for both the AMP and non-AMP page?
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  If you whitelist Google, it does not block ads.
sciurus 10y ago
Can you share those links? That has not been my experience.

fluxem 10y ago

AMP was so annoying, I had to switch to Bind on my smartphone, despite inferior results. AMP header takes 10% of screen and it doesn't disappear when you scroll down No comments section on AMP versions or on Reddit comments are not expendable Hard to get real URL to bookmark or share Request desktop option is completely broken on news.google.com

awinder 10y ago

"It also has under development a Web Share API that would allow AMP viewers to pull the original URL into the native sharing flow on the platform, instead of the AMP Viewer URL." Holy Moly, this is a huge amount of rigamarole just to support a degraded experience that helps ONE company do ONE thing in order to make further lock-in and profits in ONE way. It's hard to believe that any company would ever invest this amount of technical effort on a flawed product offering -- unless of course, it was one company with enough damned vertical integration to make it possibly worth their while.

JumpCrisscross 10y ago
> a degraded experience I like AMP over publishers' own formats, which I have to put into Reader mode to make, well, pleasantly readable. I don't like AMP's implications. But I don't think your rendering is fair.
- pdog 10y ago
  > I like AMP over publishers' own formats... Back in the day, we called them websites.
  - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
    And I still visit them! POLITICO, The Information and others have me at their sites every day. Other publications, e.g. the Washington Post or Wall Street Journal have me Googling for AMP versions. Note that my main search engine is Duck Duck Go. For me, Google's doing something meaningfully helpful with AMP.
    - vonklaus 10y ago
      I use ddg for search. I like it but it is a hassle to have to toggle safe mode every time. I wish they had a url/alternative to toggle this literally every browser load.
      - 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

homero 10y ago

AMP needs to die

wyager 10y ago

AMP is literally the most user-unfriendly thing I have seen on the internet in years. It's like an exaggerated example of an aggressively awful UX antipattern. It's what finally caused me to switch to DuckDuckGo on my phone. Sucks that the results aren't nearly as topical as Google's for most searches.

acqq 10y ago

Even the famous Podesta e-mail hack was made possible thanks to the... Google AMP page server policies! See the picture(1) here: https://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/38680/1476913065736588.png https://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-images/contentim... Unless you knew that google.com made their main domain redirect to anything(!) to provide amp, you'd really believe that the click was going to end up on the google.com servers, the place where your login data for Google services really is. Instead, google.com was used as the least expected redirector of them all. It was known among the security people: http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2016/Apr/70 http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2016/Apr/70 But google at that time kept it being a fully invisible redirector. Their explanation then: they "do not consider open redirects to be a security issue." They also wrote: "we generally hold that a small number of properly monitored redirectors offers fairly clear benefits and poses very little practical risk." Benefits for whom but Google? And what was proper then in this Podesta redirect? It seems they now finally changed the handling of the redirection, adding "The previous page is sending you to ..." instead of doing it invisibly. It took the Podesta e-mail hack, possibly changing who's gotten to be a US president, and some time to go by for them to add that change. That's the untold story of who, how, and for which goals influenced the election (Google, Amp, as the unexpected effect of the profit goals of spreading amp as much as possible). Apparently the aide of Podesta later claimed to have made a typo: "When the phishing email first arrived, Podesta referred it to a number of aides. An aide named Charles Delavan replied, “This is a legitimate email"" "Delavan says he had meant to write “illegitimate email,” and simply mistyped." Or maybe it really looked legitimate to him at that moment: the server behind the link was obviously google.com. Who didn't carefully follow what Google did with amp couldn't possibly guess that the main google.com domain just became an invisible redirector thanks to amp. ---- 1) The picture is from the following article: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-hackers-broke-into-john-podesta-and-colin-powells-gmail-accounts https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-hackers-broke...

xigency 10y ago
What's also amazing is that this specific Google vulnerability was disclosed to Google and discussed on this website before that leak.

aruggirello 10y ago

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

saycheese 10y ago

All AMP needs to do is add an "X" to the top right corner and if it's clicked ask the user if they want to opt-out of AMP. Either way, the user get sent to the "native" version of the URL they requested when they click the URL.

amelius 10y ago

Let me introduce CASUVP -- Cooperatively Ad-stripped universally viewable pages. It's a concept, there's no implementation yet. Basically, it's a version of the web where users cooperatively clean up web pages from ads and other unwanted material (e.g. scrollbar-hijacking, user-tracking), so that only the plain text with minimal markup of the article, and images remain. The cleaned-up pages are distributed by torrent or by IPFS, and there is a consensus algorithm to make sure that pages are not tampered with (e.g. by content distributors). Browser plugins help users view and seed the material. Now if only people pick up this idea and implement it...

ComodoHacker 10y ago

“URLs and origins represent, to some extent, trust and ownership of content. When you’re reading a New York Times article, a quick glimpse at the URL gives you a level of trust that what you’re reading represents the voice of the New York Times. Attribution, brand, and ownership are clear.” Oh, Google suddenly acknowledges the value of real URL for the user...

rewrew 10y ago

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

TD-Linux 10y ago
AMP pages are prioritized in search results.

technion 10y ago

AMP's v0 is 188K of JavaScript. Google's standard analytics.js is currently 28K. If you're running AMP, the AMP compliant version of the same thing, is 64K. Neither of these block rendering and both of these run largely in the background, yet making it AMP compliant more than doubles whatever code it requires. AMP will make progress when I can use it without actually introducing bloat.

qwrusz 10y ago

I would love to know what is really going on here. I'm admittedly not very technical, but like a prisoner scratching tally marks on the wall each day, I try to keep up on the latest "how tech companies are fucking us over" news of the moment, even though I can't do anything about it. Google is pushing AMP on pages in their search results today. Fine, implemented it like idiots. Happens. But I would not be surprised if in the near future Google comes out with "AMS" "Accelerated Mobile Sites", and forces entire websites into this madness. I get it, "fast, efficient" is always the story. Monopolistic nerves, quasi-TLA control fetishes, and an old-fashioned internet land-grab is the rumor. But that is too simple for this much trouble and expense. A few years ago Google was dealing with SPDY, QUIC, HTTP2, and talking about "fast, efficient" but you know something felt fishy there too and there was a back-room-dealy vibe with more to the story. Anywho, while I would love to know what's going on and I have some guesses, I don't really care anymore. Google is wasting everyone's time with these games. So... Why doesn;t Google just get on with it and host the entire internet? [1] For free. Please correct me but Google is already cacheing the internet. Offering to just host the world will allow them to implement whatever bullshit protocols they were going to do anyway. It would kill off most competitor risk from AWS and whatever Microsoft came out with 9 years late. They can afford it. And they have the space (yottabtye my ass). That's it Google. Just bend us over and host the internet. [1] ok not the entire internet, 99% of it. Doubt they would host the porn for free.

jzl 10y ago

Ha! I complained about this exact problem here a month ago. I'm taking full credit. :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13386243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13386243

cramforce 10y ago
Thanks for the feedback! I did, however, announce this change 2 months ago :) https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/794585395056939009 https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/794585395056939009

malikNF 10y ago

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

frik 10y ago

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

LeicaLatte 10y ago

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