4 ms·

It's ridiculous. Google wants to keep users at its domain so much that it invents a whole technology to substitute address bar contents. This shows how harmful

It's ridiculous. Google wants to keep users at its domain so much that it invents a whole technology to substitute address bar contents. This shows how harmful it is when a company has a significant market share in several different areas (browsers and search engines). I hope at least Mozilla doesn't adopt this technology and will show the true URL. This technology is complicated. Browser vendors have to implement all of this only to please Google.

Ajedi32 8y ago
This is the exact opposite of "keeping users at its domain". That was the situation _before_ they implemented this standard. Now users will get sent to the publisher's domain instead (via a prefetched page load).
- proaralyst 8y ago
  But it's served from Google, so they still control all the analytics
  - Ajedi32 8y ago
    No they don't. The page contents are controlled by the publisher and cryptographically signed so Google can't alter it. Another improvement over the previous situation.
    - josteink 8y ago
      Since it’s not fetched from the publisher they will have to use Google analytics or have nothing. Guess what they’re going to choose.
      - Ajedi32 8y ago
        Google Analytics isn't the only analytics solution out there. Publishers can use literally _any_ method of gathering analytics that's not server logs.
lucb1e 8y ago
Indeed, Google just has too much market share. Last week I blocked Google from my domains (blog: lucb1e.com/!130), hopefully others will follow suit and degrade the search quality until people get better results (at least for some more obscure content) elsewhere, or perhaps until Google notices we are really not okay with their behaviour.
- spartas 8y ago
  Are you blocking GoogleBot by IP range or User-Agent match? Why aren't you using your robots.txt file to block GoogleBot instead or in addition to your server-side logic?
  - lucb1e 8y ago
    Robots.txt was my first thought as well, but that is said to not actually block your site from appearing in the results. They'll gather from other sites what the page is about (think <a href=mysite/somepage>how to knit a sweater</a>) and show that as title without page summary. Maybe if it looks like the site is down, they won't bother. Blocking is based on user agent, they seem to set that reliably and the IP addresses change. You can do some reverse lookup magic but this was way easier than looking up every single IP that visits my site.

Ajedi32 8y ago

This is the exact opposite of "keeping users at its domain". That was the situation _before_ they implemented this standard. Now users will get sent to the publisher's domain instead (via a prefetched page load).

proaralyst 8y ago
But it's served from Google, so they still control all the analytics
- Ajedi32 8y ago
  No they don't. The page contents are controlled by the publisher and cryptographically signed so Google can't alter it. Another improvement over the previous situation.
  - josteink 8y ago
    Since it’s not fetched from the publisher they will have to use Google analytics or have nothing. Guess what they’re going to choose.
    - Ajedi32 8y ago
      Google Analytics isn't the only analytics solution out there. Publishers can use literally _any_ method of gathering analytics that's not server logs.

lucb1e 8y ago

Indeed, Google just has too much market share. Last week I blocked Google from my domains (blog: lucb1e.com/!130), hopefully others will follow suit and degrade the search quality until people get better results (at least for some more obscure content) elsewhere, or perhaps until Google notices we are really not okay with their behaviour.

spartas 8y ago
Are you blocking GoogleBot by IP range or User-Agent match? Why aren't you using your robots.txt file to block GoogleBot instead or in addition to your server-side logic?
- lucb1e 8y ago
  Robots.txt was my first thought as well, but that is said to not actually block your site from appearing in the results. They'll gather from other sites what the page is about (think <a href=mysite/somepage>how to knit a sweater</a>) and show that as title without page summary. Maybe if it looks like the site is down, they won't bother. Blocking is based on user agent, they seem to set that reliably and the IP addresses change. You can do some reverse lookup magic but this was way easier than looking up every single IP that visits my site.