Google AMP Issue: Links to visit the site currently not working
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WE don't live in an ideal world and AMP is my only option of getting de-bloated webpages. I would love if managers and directors would do this themselves and AMP wouldn't be needed, but that's just not the case.
I have to choose between downloading some text and images to read an article or load 5MB JavaScript SinglePageApp with tracking, ads, auto playing video's...
I know in an ideal world AMP would be useless, but until we reach that world I'm going to prefer AMP links over normal ones.
AMP is about getting into the carousel search results, and if AMP wasn't the only way to do that, we wouldn't feel forced to use it.
To just download text and images I use www.outline.com, but there are lots of ways to accomplish this.
Of course, google could have just favored really small/fast site that worked well on mobile... but this way they get the extra lock in.
That's significantly different than debloating your website and remaining in control of the traffic, but you don't receive the SEO boost as a consequence. Even if you make your website faster than it would be if you were using AMP (which is not that difficult to achieve), you're still being punished for not giving control to Google.
I don’t think google should be in charge of that, especially if they use search results as a way to force adoption.
Countless posts have been made by site operators who needed to adopt AMP to remain competitive in google search results.
It isn't, though. Plenty of sites out there are de-bloated, and things like Reader Mode in browsers makes the rest work just fine.
But, we don't live in that world I'm afraid. And for many news websites I don't want to even begin downloading the auto-playing video on their page. So AMP is for many the easiest choice.
AMP is an obvious abuse of a dominant market position and Google will come to regret it.
Google could very well have given huge boosts to small/fast websites, and then the sites would have had to figure it out wrt advertising and bloat. It would have been a much better result.
You are completely not understanding my point of having the OPTION to disable it, so users who don't want to deal with AMP at all (myself, and many others) can have that ability.
And, as in the main story, the AMP page bricking the link to the real url.
Not sure there's an extension API that could make signed exchanges work either.
AMP takes control away from web publishers by forcing them to allow anyone to serve their content (signed exchanges). Publishers no longer have control over how their sites get served (for example, no more server-side logs, because Google has forced you to let them serve your site).
It allows large sites (like Google) to have more control over smaller sites by putting back buttons at the top of your website in order to take them back to Google Search. The related "portals" scheme is the new "can you open all external links in a frame?" and small sites are going to be hurt the most.
Hardly anyone would implement that garbage if they weren't being threatened by Google with a traffic drop. If the ultimatum were "just make your website fast and add some schema markup to get in the carousel" then that would be fine. Forcing the entire Web to change to a restrictive format and load JavaScript from Google's servers, and seizing control of how websites are hosted is terribly damaging to the Web itself.
Publishers don't want to be forced into using "instant loading web pages" if it fundamentally breaks the nature of the WWW and takes control away from them and gives it to a few large companies (AMP caches).
Publishers have to meet users where the users want, and AMP is easily the best of the options because by implementing it once, publishers provide instant loading through multiple link aggregators. If I want to write my own link aggregator, I don't need the clout of a FAANG to get publishers to do a data integration for instant loading pages — I can just implement an AMP cache and use the AMP pages they have already published. AMP levels the playing field.
Google doesn't have a right to damage/destroy the Web or take control away from publishers so that Google can compete with Facebook and Apple. That is not a reasonable argument.
Publishers don't want AMP and the project would fail (as it should) if Google weren't strong-arming everyone to use it with a threat of traffic loss.
The Web is not a Google product, but Google is treating it like one. The company has seriously lost its way.
Google and the other search engines don't show AMP links if you have JavaScript disabled because it is impossible to prerender them without JavaScript, so you shouldn't even see AMP links without JavaScript. This criticism is nonsensical.
> Google doesn't have a right to damage/destroy the Web or take control away from publishers so that Google can compete with Facebook and Apple
The publishers get to decide if they want to integrate with Facebook, Apple, and all the AMP caches. The former two they have less control over because they only go to one company and don't have open governance.
> Publishers don't want AMP
They want the first two even less, but I don't see anybody complaining about that. As I said earlier, the problem for publishers is that users demand instant loading. AMP at least lets the publishers control analytics, ads, A/B testing, etc.
But we've gotten way off track again. Users demand instant loading pages. How do you solve it? Would you rather have Google require the publishers directly integrate with them as Apple and Facebook have done and not allow other link aggregators to benefit? Users also like RSS, which takes even more control away from publishers, does not allow above-the-fold loading optimizations for users, and has a much less rich experience, but nobody here has ever complained about RSS.
A better solution than AMP would be to only consider raw page speed, and then use a neutral schema markup for whatever extra features Google wants to display in Google Search.
AMP is not a subset of HTML. It's a superset of a (badly defined) subset of HTML.
Here are some other pages:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+amp&t=...
Desktop mode disables AMP on Chrome Android for me. I haven't tested with iOS though.
How about de-bloating your webpages instead?
Seriously, people, come on — just put less cruft in your web pages. Don't load 500 trackers. Say no when the marketing guys come over and tell you to add 10 more. Tell your bosses that marketing is incompetent. Push back and tell people that adding cruft is bad.
Please don't bother telling me how it "can't be done". It can, but you might not want to.
I'm actually quite happy about the way this AMP thing is unrolling: the bloated crappy sites will walk into the jaws of AMP and get badly owned by Google eventually, being completely dependent on them.
For context so people don't get the wrong idea... I just want to point out that the gp you responded to (apexalpha) wrote "my option" and _he_ (as a web surfer) is not the manager in charge of those other programmers adding in the cruft. In his next sentence he wrote:
>I would love if managers and directors would do this themselves and AMP wouldn't be needed, but that's just not the case.
NB. the remaining animated gifs can be stopped on palemoon and I think FX with shift+escape.
You occasionally gets CSS animations but they are pretty rare.
I'm not an iPhone expert but those don't seem simple.
In iOS, you can enter urls one at a time in the blocklist which is cumbersome. Obviously, this doesn't work for thousands of ad network urls. What people do on desktops is import a big hosts file but my cursory research says you can't do that on a non-jailbroken iPhone.[1]
If you mean "block" via DNS such as pointing to Adguard DNS servers, you can only manually change the DNS server ip address on wifi connections and not the cellular connection. For DNS blocks on cellular, you have to install vpn software.[2]
Disabling Javascript breaks sites like "cnn.com" (Yes, people should go to other sites instead of CNN but I don't mean for people to fixate on that one example. It's just one example of breakage of a widely known site instead of an obscure one.) Also on reddit.com, the collapse button "[-]" and the upvote/downvote buttons no longer work.
(But I'm not saying any iPhone setup difficulties means you should use AMP.)
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2028544/does-hosts-file-...
[2] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/303168/ios-11-how-...
It's politically untenable. Marketing brings in the $$$ and you don't.
So when you can point to the carousel and say "You can either have that or the trackers" you actually have some leverage to push back on marketing.
It would be nice to just disable JS on mobile though.
Meanwhile, the easiest way to speed up pages is to stop selling ads and splitting up content over multiple clicks.
E.g. at a company we had to add "useless" content on our shop pages, otherwise google ranked the pages lower due to having not enough content.
If any feature/change introduces a regression, they will not ship it. (That kinda indicates that people outside of hn actually like amp)
Keep in mind that: amp team != search team.
Doubt. Especially "time spent on website" primarily indicates that the user didn't quickly find what they were looking for.
You'd be correct in assuming that it's a good indicator if it wasn't gamed. Since people believe that it's a ranking factor, they'll do whatever they can to increase it. Shitty SEO texts that go on and on without actually saying anything, breaking the back button, adding exit intent popovers, you name it, it's out there. All heavily increasing time on site. Are the users happy? Do you prefer a 5 sentence page that just plainly answers your question about some topic, or do you want a twenty paragraph novel that maybe, possibly somewhere includes the answer, but you need to completely read this opus magnum first?
Is that why answers are always buried in long articles or walls of text?
Seems a horrible metric.
Publishers definitely use it more heavily.
You can easily make pages lighter without AMP, and we shouldn't so easily swallow the reasons given by Google for its introduction.
AMP was only ever needed because so many made their pages so artificiality heavy in the first place and had no incentive to make them lighter.
AMP SEO advantage is a great incentive to make them lighter. The thing is, Google could have pushed their algorithm toward performance more and make it clear on their page too and have the same effect. They just found a way to get more control from it too.
AMP was a very calculated move on Google's part. The narrative of "we're only doing it to help our users avoid the bloat" when everyone agrees that bloat is a huge problem works very well.
Didn't they? I mean, I figure everybody read the case studies about page load time and user abandonment. My experience is that those who built a leaner mobile version of their desktop site were also mostly the ones that built an AMP version (WP + "I'll just install a plugin and see what happens" left aside), while those that never cared about mobile users still don't.
Does AMP deliver better rankings? I haven't seen that on sites that I'm affiliated with, but that may be niche specific or the improvement wasn't big enough to go from 4 to 3 etc.
> that never cared about mobile users still don't.
News website still have multiple MB per page and they all got an AMP version which is much more lightweight.
> Does AMP deliver better rankings?
That's a good question. I do know that Google would show news stories with AMP at the top first, but that was part of a different widget. I do remember reading that it helped ranking.
(AMP isn't even that light - Google preloads pages in its AMP carousel, using bandwidth whether you tap to view them or not)
Aren't those 2 sentences contradictory?
The entire web?
Which market is Google unfairly benefiting/profiting in, by leveraging its market share in search?
All of Google myriad of properties benefit from being able to limit competitors web page size, limit their technology use, restrict advertising and gating them behind your own servers.
Plus on top, Google doesn't have to do any of that shit themselves and can gleefully put themselves at the top of every search (and are doing with an ever expanding array of search terms).
As well as increasing the cost of developing a site to compete with any of Google's myriad properties, by having to support HTML and Google's proprietary AMP, that they're pretending is an open standard but is completely under their control.
Why shouldn't a company be able to decide what they feature on their search results and how they rank things? If every result was a Google owned site, so what? Nothing is stopping you from using a different search engine.
Hence the big fines that google is starting to get hit with, with some regularity.
AMP links are everywhere now, not just Google search results.
Thank goodness for the bot on Reddit that posts replies with the actual link, for any AMP links that are posted.
But as someone who's just an end user, and not working on frontend development who likes AMP, I don't bother commenting when the opinion is extremely skewed to one side.
I love AMP. The website loads faster, feels a lot snappier, and is overall positive experience for me. That's what I care about. I don't care how it got to that point, I want usable and fast loading website - and AMP gives me that.
Can this be speed and mobile friendliness be implemented without AMP? Yes. Is it implemented without AMP? Very rarely.
Of course there's the argument with google trying to get a tighter grip on web and while that is not a good thing the truth is that I, and huge majority of average consumers, just don't care if it means better results for me.
>Of course there's the argument with google trying to get a tighter grip on web and while that is not a good thing the truth is that I, and huge majority of average consumers, just don't care if it means better results for me.
What you are describing is the very common mix of "tragedy of the commons" + "pure utilitarianism". The future would be vastly better if everyone made a small sacrifice now, but each individual action counts for so little that you make the selfish but rational choice of letting others do the small sacrifice.
Maybe your page loads faster now, but this is happening by risking the destruction of the very environment that makes such pages worth reading (independent journalism, freedom from corporate control, etc.). In the long run, it means worse results for you, but your individual sacrifice is unlikely to have any effect. You feel selfish, so you rationalize a story where you are just the "common person" doing what makes sense.
The fact that we have a civilization is proof that there are ways out of this deadlock. For a long time, the answer was religion. We need something for the XXI century to play that role, i.e. making people think not only as individuals but also members of an entire species, ecosystem, etc.
Meanwhile, what you are saying amounts to: "fuck you, I got mine".
>just don't care if it means better results for me.
That's part of the issue though, isn't it? Privacy advocates on here and elsewhere point out frequently that part of the problem is that people don't care enough. There's a similar dynamic in this case.
With AMP, this is cut down to tens of milliseconds.
The question isn't what do people normally do. The question is what's possible without Google's help. 200ms click-to-render is not difficult.
Google can get that down to 20ms or whatever with AMP, but for 99.999% of sites, Google's monopoly position is not the thing holding you back from faster loads.
Google's, Bing's, Baidu's, etc.'s users by and large also love AMP or else they wouldn't spend the money on the infrastructure.
I present to you AMP tech lead: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cramforce
I think AMP provides the tools for a good UX but many sites don't provide it because they want the user to go to their site, because they mistakenly don't think they can get enough ad revenue or CTAs to get the user to sign up for mailing lists or add a product to a shopping cart on the AMP page. These are supported. So they only show an excerpt of the article on the AMP page and you have to go to the site in order to get it.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for over a year now and it’s just painful.
And their image search is far inferior.
Same applies to the query "c++ hash map", first page of Google is medium posts & unrelated stack overflow questions, DDG serves https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/unordered_map as the first result. I assume Google is serving better results for other people, I just don't know why my results are so poor, possibly its due to adblocking & tracking protection. FWIW these searches were performed on brave Android with 1.1.1.1 DNS.
Edit: the hashmap query is to provide a slightly malformed example, since what I really want is unordered_map. If I already know exactly what I want then Google can serve results, but that kinda defeats the point.
AMP isn't limited to Google cache. Websites and CDNs (like Bing and Cloudflare) can roll their own AMP and cache it themselves, while still getting the icon in search results.
Example: https://amp.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6yj6iw/what_did_...
1: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-c...
We need more pushback against Google doing stuff like this, even when at first glance what they push for seems "positive."
No obstruction of the contents, branding or attribution of the original AMP document.
In that specific case, isn’t Barb correct, no chills needed?
Of course Google can't host illegal content on their service, right? And won't host content that goes against a future AMP user agreement...
From there they can tighten the screws against competitors, or future attempts at privacy, or basically anything they get away with.
Also, I think what AMP was pitted against--Facebook instant articles--no longer exists, or at least doesn't particularly matter (now that FB is several pivots beyond the whole 'newsfeed is full of articles' stage).
(Disclosure: I work at Google, not on AMP, and I'm only speaking for myself)
I'm not sure where you're getting "selflessness". The faster pages load from search the better people's experience of using search is. This directly benefits both Google and people who use search.
Everything else is the result of that original decision. And the continuous apologetics for the myriad bad and malignant decisions are the direct result of that decision.
Yes, only a tiny minority of technical users will know what amp pages are and switch search engines to avoid them. But, a larger group will likely find the amp pages annoying, even if they can't precisely articulate why. This weakens google's hold on the market.
If the amp page displays what you expect, it works well. It it makes you click through, it doesn't.
Of course, users may or may not realize amp/google are the reason a site is broke.
Dunno how many people have issues like this though. Reddit was the main one for me, plus a few random sites having issues.
But it isn't always obvious how to get to the site from an AMP page.
Hmm. If AMP participation were voluntary, I would agree, but given how necessary it is to SEO ranking, Google deserves a large portion of any blame for broken content - They do not get a free pass to enforce usage of a protocol, but dodge the consequences of its implementation (which will always involve friction and some breakage).
(assuming Google is not stupid so Hanlon's razor may not apply)
https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871240432660480
Downthread:
""" And every time, they’d say, “oops. That was accidental. We’ll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks.” """
At best they wanted to test user reaction, or at worst, they were hoping it wouldn't be discovered (see Wi-Fi scanning, Safari cookies block bypass, tracking Android users' location at all time, even when "disabled", etc).
Don't attribute to stupidity what can easily be explained by profit incentives (did I just invent a new saying/law?!).
But now that Google has removed the link to visit the site, it is clear they don’t want you to visit the actual news site but do everything through Google.
This means that only the Google ad network will be allowed, so they stand to benefit from this arrangement, and news sites can have no hope of receiving any traffic.
Maybe this list would help?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
Soon one won't be able to train NLP models on certain archetypes of speech if they continue banning everything deviating from preferred topics of their advertising/corporate sponsors :-(
But they did it to themselves. i.reddit.com is fast as hell.
m.reddit.com loads 100x the Javascript.
Thus Amp fixes a probme they created bc reasons.
Most of the JS is part of the different ad tech networks anyway. Hell, maybe that's their drive? Making it harder to have competiting ad tech?
I though links was a pretty important part of HTML, and so people took care to ensure they work?
[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-launches-portals-a-new-...
However, in my experience the header is totally different. There is an (i) icon in the upper left corner that shows the link when tapped, and the upper right corner shows the share icon and tapping it opens the share dialog. Note this changed for me recently (I used to get the link icon like the poster).
So Google is clearly testing different behavior, which probably led to the bug. In any case, I'd note the version I got that I think the (i) is much less clear than the link icon, and I'm sure the end result is people clicking through to the source site less often. Fuck Google and their aggressive attempts to hijack the web even more than they already have.
Just use another search engine like DuckDuckGo. It is sufficient for over 90% of my searches and I haven’t seen an amp page in ages.
AMP for SEO is another discussion, in that case it is kind of forced on you if you want to rank high on the Googlenet.
Even though I don’t use Google for search, my friends do and they’ll gladly share AMP pages with me.
I actually love AMP on mobile. Every site I've used(1) that has an AMP version loads faster and works better even with some ads than the normal version on Firefox mobile with uBlock Origin. Given that it's possible for people to host their own AMP cache (like Cloudflare does), I really don't see the problem with AMP itself.
(1) Other then Reddit, but considering how much of a dumpster fire their normal mobile site is I honestly think that it's broken on purpose to try and make people use the app.
The easiest way to to get rid of all AMP pages in Google search results is to disable javascript on www.google.com/*.
It's the circle on the bottom right in the first frame of the video.
And the follow up thought: "move fast and break things" suggests that we should think twice before relying on these companies for anything close to critical infrastructure.
The broken feature is the exact feature that lets you not use it....