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.
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.
If you’re really “googling” for AMP versions I recommend you should get the “AMP Validator[1]” extension. Aside from validating, it parses the <meta> tags on current website and lets you click-through to go to AMP version.
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.
This appears to work. The "settings" tab appears to say that safesearch is on but this overrides it. Not sure if for the session or just a oneoff but nice to know and gets the job done.
Going to check out some other "bangs" now im aware.
AMP is not the problem - the AMP cache is pure evil and if it wasn't for Google forcing it on people through their SERPs there would be no reason for Google to add it or have to work around it...
I want to visit publishers own sites and not weird walled Google land.
You present no real argument rather than calling it pure evil. It loads fast, ads and analytics go where they're supposed to, and now the URL issue is mostly gone too.
For users, it's basically seamless benefit with no draw backs.
For developers, yes it takes effort but a lot of it is done for you, and you also inherit this huge cache, which you call evil but in reality, costs quite a lot of money and you're getting for free.
It's easy to call something "evil" and completely dismiss all the huge benefits of a technology, but I'd like to hear what exactly are the remaining issue.
The AMP team has done their best to one by one address anything that has come up.
The "press close to go back" idiom you've invented out of thin air is terrible.
This is a solved problem. We already have a button for going back and it works swimmingly.
Even my grandmother knows that the "X" gets rid of annoying overlays (usually ads) so she can properly view the content she was trying to get to in the first place.
Google maps for iPhone is incredibly confusing when it uses "custom chrome tabs". Unlike almost every app that hands off to a browser application. When in a "custom chrome tab", I want to go back maps, so I hit the home button. Because that's how you switch apps, but wait, where is maps? Oh I'm in maps. I don't see how this could user test well when it's an anti pattern to the device itself.
Did the team think eliminating a banner or frame that wraps enclosing content was not MVP material? I'm glad Google has now made this available, but I was shocked - and unhappy - when I first realized AMP did not originally have it.
Since I do not stay up to date with the latest from Google all the time, and didn't even know AMP was a thing until I encountered it in a production google search one day, I had no chance to offer feedback. I imagine many iOS developers, who must be focused on native app things rather than Web-based things, would be in a similar boat; we would be happy to provide feedback, but I don't know how I would have even been asked for feedback, let alone have discovered that something like this was coming so I could proactively make a comment.
I hate it for custom tabs too. But what I really hate is the way AMP hijacks scrolling and page navigation. It totally breaks the feature of Android Chrome that allows you to quickly search a selected word by swiping up from the bottom. Have you tested the interaction of AMP with that prominent Chrome feature? It's symptomatic of the way AMP breaks web assumptions.
Appreciate you sharing that, good to hear it's under consideration.
More cynical me might say that rolling out the 'X' with that behavior, though, gets the conversation to be about fixing the banner...versus removing it altogether.
What is the URL to the accompanying article? This screenshot seems disturbingly effective, I'd like to see the rest of the flow. I wonder if the scam breaks down once you click the link or if it would be very hard to tell it's fishing even to a trained eye.
Well, because the implementation uses google urls, right? I assume they could have asked users to create amp.theirdomain.com CNAME records and upload appropriate certificates, right? Or the solution that cloudflare is using, or?
Ahh, I finally get it. An intentional walled garden that's a little bit open for now. I'm in the pot, and it's not terrible yet, but you just barely turned on the heat.
I assume it ends with everything in the serps being preloaded. And the only things in the serps being compliant content.
That language is misleading: only AMP articles are eligible for "Top Stories" placement, which means non-AMP results are completely excluded from the most prominent ranking on SERPs.
AMP may not be used as a ranking factor within each class of results, but it absolutely creates two distinct classes of results, where AMP is given priority over the open Web.
You're right in that I really shouldn't be directing that at you. I believe that you, personally, are trying to do the right thing. Apologies for the snark.
However, I believe the Google devs behind Froogle also had good intentions. They provided a framework to make product pages easier to consume for Google. They provided a real incentive for publishers to conform to that standard. They got nice placement in a carousel, cached display of product images, and so forth. Then, later, well...
Edit: And whatever the technical reason for the google urls, it does open up possibilities for the future that aren't desirable. It's a dangerous precedent.
None of the benefits come from the "evil" part. You could get the same from just enforcing validation, without routing everything through google CDN, cloaking URLs and breaking the UI.
The complete forking of HTML for primarily google search traffic will do more harm than good.
HTML is already fast. Google could've used search rankings to factor in site speed and forced many sites to become much faster in a few months, instead of now requiring more resources to maintain an alternative version just for them. Also 90% of the ads on the web are served by Google's own Doubleclick for Publishers, one of the slowest ad servers available.
Search rankings and the resulting traffic are a priority, changes would be made quickly. AMP pages were rolled out within weeks as well, but all that time and effort could've been spent on making the universal HTML page much better.
Lol you haven't worked with may real sites in the wild around 80% of the ones I have worked with need the CTO to tell the developers to pull their socks up or your all on a PIP
What? What are "real sites"? I'm in the adtech industry and know execs and devs at all the top publishers. Revenue/traffic issues are at the top of the list. They don't sit around doing nothing all day.
Regardless, resources are always constrained and working on AMP means not working on the standard (mobile) HTML version.
These tricks have always been the bread and butter of spammers and scammers: Make users think they have clicked through to NYT when they are actually still on your site. Show NYT's content on your own site in an iframe.
Except NYT put their content there and has near full control of it. It's just hosted (and paid) by someone else. It's just like you using my server as a mirror. You can take it down or edit it at any time you want. So your example makes no sense.
This is a mutually beneficial setup. Google provides fast servers all across the globe for free and includes it in the AMP carousel. There's value both ways, and user gets a much faster experience.
Yes, there are a couple UX that are a bit rough, but looking at this change, it seems like they are actively working to improve it.
proof it is evil: a site that doesn't support amp but is as nimble/fast and have Datacenters with lower latency to their readers than google, will still be punished (on Google's serp) over a site that has a crap website but gave in onto amp.
I think it might be that the technical team behind the AMP has good intentions but they are so focused on the perf/UX that they can't see the bigger picture about creating walled gardens, punishing sites from outside it, and other confusing things.
It's not the first time you
could see that googlers live in a bubble and need a strong criticism from external world to see some problems. Google != Internet (though it's a big subset)
> The fact that there's a list means that some are not on it, which means that there is a gatekeeper.
It's not a whitelist, those are just the pre-written supported analytics packages. Scroll up on that page. It sends configurable requests to an HTTPS endpoint based on the configuration you provide.
This. What is the process to be added? Does Google have sole control to approve and revoke access to that list? Does it place an unreasonable burden on ad tech startups that might one day be viable competitors to Google's own offering? How much will it hinder FB and their attempts at rolling out a GDN competitor?
1. Sign a Contributor License Agreement granting relevant copyright and patent licenses to Google so they can redistribute your contributions to AMP. You also give Google an unrestricted right to use those patents and copyrights in any of its projects, not just AMP.
2. For ad networks, submit a pull request according to /ads/README.md
3. For analytics providers, submit a pull request according to /extensions/amp-analytics/integrating-analytics.md
> Does Google have sole control to approve and revoke access to that list?
> Does it place an unreasonable burden on ad tech startups that might one day be viable competitors to Google's own offering?
The work of the pull request does not seem particularly burdensome, however, if AMP successfully replaces the Web, then it may be prohibitively difficult for new startups to gain enough traction to merit inclusion in AMP's whitelist.
> How much will it hinder FB and their attempts at rolling out a GDN competitor?
AMP's legal and design constraints may limit Facebook's ability to innovate in that space, however, I'd be shocked if Google excluded Facebook from the amp-ad whitelist. The AMP project has been very willing to accept pull requests from established ad networks. They also provide a bespoke amp-facebook tag for embedding Facebook content within AMP documents, so there's some indication of cooperation.
Do I recall correctly that you are a Googler working on AMP? Or am I mistaken?
Regardless, the questions were hardly rhetorical--I'd really like to know, and the other responder answered some of the questions with answers that confirmed some of my concerns.
Don't get me wrong...I think parts of what Google is doing here are solid and admirable. Publishers screwed the pooch and something had to give. But that doesn't mean Google gets a free pass on the strategic pieces of this they are clearly trying to set up and what they've done to date. The questions are valid and if you feel they are unwarranted concerns, I'd love to learn why you think the concerns are overrated.
I'm looking to provide website integrations including analysis for publishers in a new way that AMP doesn't support. Embrace and extend really screws up my idea here.
Speaking only and solely for just myself, I do not care whose site I read the material on. I just want it presented in a reasonable, readable manner. A number of publishers seem to struggle with this.
I think the fact AMP (cache) was at least initially broken for lots of people is very concerning; next there is duplicating and breaking pieces of the web (links!). In my opinion the AMP cache should be opt in then quite a few of my concerns go away.
That's what I was doing, because I hate scrolling on AMP pages.
However it also made Google useless. I may see an interesting page, but then notice that it had the AMP stamp, and no (visible) way to get the non-AMP page.
AMP made Google useless for me. Then I discovered DDG. And now I use DDG as the default search everywhere, because I get more relevant results than with Google! So I guess I should thank Google for ruining their search with AMP and opening my eyes to alternatives.
The issue is that google has been pushing these slow, bulky pages to the top of their results, then they swoop in with AMP to fix the problem. The problem AMP is trying to solve is very real, but the answer isn't to consolidate things further into google's ecosystem.
If we were able to provide quick and light pages with an equivalent experience to AMP and have these pages receive the speed and SEO boosting which AMP pages enjoy, that would be fair.
Currently, because the New York Times' website is overloaded with ads and bullshit, Google takes it upon themselves to identify "accelerated" sites and penalising everyone who doesn't implement AMP regardless of the speed of their site.
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.