"I hope I am not being too hard on Google." -- no, the author is being very, very nice. Google has a strong business interest in users never going to other sites. Between AMP & voice search, the future is going to be very rough for businesses that rely on free search traffic.<p>In practical business terms I would strongly suggest website owners build ultra-light versions of their sites. If you have international aspirations your site should work on Opera Mini. If you have a big audience it is very reasonable and worth it to have desktop/tablet, smartphone, and ultra-lite versions of your site.<p>Reposting part of a comment I made a month back on AMP:<p>#1 There is a big problem with mobile sites. I'm using a recent iPhone and many popular news sites, without ad blockers, are as close to unusable as the worst websites I've ever been to, dating back to using Internet Explorer in 1999. Auto playing inline video ads that slide in to view, just insane. These things clearly kill time on site and reader retention. I have theories about why publishers are ignoring this, but who knows.<p>#2 Google is using AMP to co-opt publisher's traffic. This means users are scrolling to another story from another publisher or easily bouncing back to the Google results when they land on your content. (See the X in the story link on the animated gif example.)
There goes your time on site and long term user retention. If #1 was a problem for you already, you probably don't notice.<p>#3 AMP & Instant articles are going to put a stranglehold on third party ad networks and represent a very real anti-trust issue.
There are a bunch of other privacy implications too, which have been discussed in length. Publishers should be thinking really hard about their future.
AMP is essentially Google's answer to people creating terrible web experiences.
It's been discussed and documented a lot. Common webpages today load content from dozens of different ad, tracking and whatever hosts, take several megabytes to load. All well known, but people don't stop doing it.<p>Now Google comes along and says: You can't do it, let us do it. Which is perfectly reasonable from their point of view. And when I surf google news on my slow mobile connection I'm always happy when I see that a link is going to an amp target - because then I know it'll be loaded fast.<p>But you don't need Google to do that. If you don't like AMP nobody stops you from doing the same thing. Limit the amount of stuff you load into your page, reduce the third party content that you include to a sane number of hosts (something like 3 instead of 50), optimize your javascript, deploy HTTP/2. None of that is magic and you can have your fast webpage without any AMP.
The whole idea of AMP seems like it's really the wrong way to solve the problem. If you remove all the third party JavaScript, fonts, large images and "like" buttons you'll have effectively the same. I guess it already messes up ads and analytics (although I'd assume Google's services still work), so what's the problem?<p>Kind of related: I recently switched my blog from Wordpress to Hugo. I found a minimal theme, but the amount of junk it was loading was shocking. I created a stripped down version if anyone is interested: <a href="https://github.com/lucaspiller/hugo-privacy-cactus-theme" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/lucaspiller/hugo-privacy-cactus-theme</a>
I don't (and never will) use AMP and I feel that it is patently unfair to penalize pages for not using some non-standard tech. Google should index the web fairly, not make use of their tech a factor. Webpage speed is a fair measure (and I really wouldn't know what I could do to make my pages any faster, AMP will not make a measurable difference).<p>I would expect an un-biased search engine to rate pages with and without AMP equal and to not show 'badges' based on whether or not a page uses tech by the same vendor of the search engine.
Wired broke this story [1] in February 2016, soon after Google announced it'd start directing results to the AMP Cache on the mobile site. In the meta-writeup the next day, Wired wrote "Google's AMP Is Speeding Up the Web By Changing How It Works" [2], while noting that this was a necessary step to compete with Facebook's Instant Articles and Apple's equivalent tech.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/02/google-will-now-favor-pages-use-fast-loading-tech/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/2016/02/google-will-now-favor-pages-us...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web-changing-works/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web-chang...</a>
<p><pre><code> > I was expecting it to cause a redirect to the original
> article. Instead it redirects back to Google search
> results. Say What?
</code></pre>
Well, what it does is exactly what I would expect; if clicking 'X' redirected to the author's site <i>I</i> would be thoroughly confused.<p>If I click on a link and it opens in a new tab, I don't close the tab ('X') expecting to go to the home page - I expect to go back to the page from which I opened it.
> <i>Google was injecting a large toolbar at the top of the snapshot encouraging users to get back to Google search results (a functionality already provided by the back button)</i><p>I learned, through a series of usability tests my (former) startup ran amongst its users, that most non-tech people do not click the back button and get very confused if your pages don't have their own back/forward/close/menu navigation.<p>We moved our apps workflow from "use the browsers back button to go back" to having all navigation including back/close as part of the HTML UI.
Why would I want to give up 10% of my screen space to a useless bar that when I try to exit out instead takes me away from the page? Complete UX madness.
I think that this whole AMP thing is horrible for the web.<p>It's like Google is not dictating how one should build/style their websites. Thanks, but no thanks. Stay evil, Google.
Actually having the site served from the same, already-open, probably pre-fetched connection, already open browser is great for the user.<p>It even has the advantage of loading inside the Google App, where no adblocking exists, so it might even be good for publishers.<p>Yes, there's no discovery if you don't design for that, user will just bounce.
> Consider adding a link at the top of your AMP page, giving user an option to visit the original post<p>Why should they want to read the post again? The only viable option is to have links to other posts on your site, or maybe a link to the comments.<p>By the way, what's the purpose of the bar at the top? The back button of the browser already does that, even on mobile.<p>About analytics: I don't know if those accesses don't show on Google Analytics (I really don't) but what if one uses Piwik? Is there any way to get a report of the access?
I still can't get over the fact that AMP breaks the img tag and requires JavaScript.<p>My long-running browsers instances are bogged down by JavaScript (and I have NoScript on whitelist mode, with it only allowed where necessary!). Requiring it on any fast-page standard seems counterproductive.<p>And why, <i>why</i> would they break the img tag‽
AMP in general is rather gimmick and scam. Just normal regular HTML stripped from third party tracking JS--dozen of megabytes--provides pages of the same size. It's only a matter of clean code to make a page mobile friendly.<p>Introducing yet another additional markup format to serve mobile sites with the only purpose for Google to compete better with Facebook is excessive and additional dev overhead. But it favours Google's interests and Google basically blackmails content providers locking search availability to only those who obey. And additionally it gives Google excuse to serve pages via own domain with backlinking.<p>There should be just common practices for mobile code simplicity and not another new markup.
I get that this is frustrating, but this is exactly what Google said it would do. You can still track your traffic through analytics (per my GA setup, it shows the regular domain's AMP page, rather than Google's site), and you can still run ads against it if that's what you would like to do.<p>It's not so much a shock as it is a "new normal." Whether you like that new normal, that's up to you.<p>(For what it's worth, AMP causes a significant bump to my bounce rate, made up by the higher number of visits that come in via users looking for the AMP symbol.)
Well, considering that said traffic originated from Google, and that Google was under no obligation to send it to OP's page, it's a little more nuanced than "stealing". It just means they sent different behaving traffic than usual - traffic that only touches one article and returns to Google.<p>It might discourage webmasters from adopting AMP though, if they have the expectation to lead the visitor to the homepage or other articles.
AMP is a terrible format and makes 0 progress for the open web.<p>HTML is already fast, it's all the extra resources added that makes pages slow. For publishers, the reason sites are slow is a combination of ad revenue pressure, poor tech skills, lack of time and focus on other priorities like producing content in a saturated market. This is changing slowly so that UX is more important but creating an entirely new proprietary system that only takes time away from the main site (and just affects mobile) is not the right answer.<p>More interestingly, the #1 most used adserver on the planet is Google's own DoubleClick - which means they could singlehandedly make all sites (desktop + mobile) faster by implementing better tech in their own stack.
Hm. The x button he mentions is only visible if you got to the page from Google search. If you follow the direct link to the amp page then the header just mentions his original URL as the browser (mobile safari). I would say that such behaviour is quite consistent with mobile so... whatever.
The fact that you can not go to the original page from the AMP page bothers me so much. I go as far as avoid AMP pages altogether just because of that reason.
Aren’t you supposed to put links to your other articles at the bottom of that AMP page? I mean, that seems like the best way to get users to visit your full site.
A tech lead from Google wrote his response, if anybody is interested:<p><a href="https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile-traffic/#comment-55336" rel="nofollow">https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile-...</a>
I assume Google ads that are served through AMP will still count. In that case, you can think of AMP as a high-speed static host where you still get paid even though you didn't pay for hosting. But I agree it's very surprising behavior to the actual owner of the website.<p>The usability downside of providing a link to the actual webpage should be obvious - Google is trying to pretend this <i>is</i> the actual webpage. Why would they want a redundant link just to confuse the users?<p>That said, ever since Android separated google results view from chrome and added that strange "x->back" button thing I keep getting tripped up from a usability perspective. That's more the Android team being silly again, not just AMP, I think.
> Explore the site further OR hit the back button to go back to Google search results<p>I set Google to open links in a new tab anyway so the X the OP is complaining about is actually exactly my browsing style to click X and go back to search results.
Why doesn't the author just measure how much money they are making? They seem to think some things are bad (header bar, etc) but as far as I can tell they could find out very easily if using AMP is helping or hurting.
I work for several large newspaper publishers. We have been getting pushed to get all of our content optimized for the AMP experience as to not get left behind. As stated by others though this is good for the end consumer, not so much for the newspaper industry itself.<p>One of the biggest gripes is getting our paywall model onto the AMP sites, as we have very little input as to how that is done. It also takes ages to hear back about requests/suggestions with little feedback as to why they think its a bad idea.
The web is not your personal money generator. It's a place I go for information. I'm sorry that your fellow developers have made it such a user-hostile place that projects like AMP that defend the user experience make it harder for you to make money. But maybe if you're only interested in publishing for the money, I'm not particularly interested in courting your continued participation.
Posting my comment from the article here:<p>Hey, this is Malte and I am the tech lead of the AMP Project for Google. While I work on the AMP open source project, I did check back with the Google Search team that is more directly responsible for most of the points mentioned in the post. I personally find it very important to respond, because “stealing traffic” is literally the opposite of what AMP is for. The original idea behind AMP was to allow content to be distributed to platforms (such as Google, Twitter and Pinterest) in a way that retains branding and monetization control for the publisher. AMP traffic is the publisher’s traffic. Period.<p>I also realize that “just turning on the WordPress plugin” doesn’t get you there. Especially if a WordPress installation is heavily customized, one will need to invest similar effort to get the AMP pages to the same quality. While this may be a lot of work, this is by design: We recommend to really optimize AMP pages and fine tune them to your needs. AMP is not a templated format for that reason. While neither the AMP project, nor Google are directly responsible for the WordPress plugin, the AMP open source project working closely with the authors of the plugin(s) to improve the quality and scope. AMP is very flexible and should be capable of providing most features of a typical WordPress site, but this flexibility also requires respective work to make custom plugins and development show up in the AMP version.<p>Getting more literal about “stealing traffic”: there are audience measurement platforms that attribute traffic to publishers. They might in theory wrongly attribute AMP traffic to the AMP Cache (not Google) rather than to a publisher because they primarily use referrer information. That is why we worked with them in worldwide outreach to get this corrected (where it was a problem), so that traffic is correctly attributed to the publisher. If this is still a problem anywhere, AMP treats it as a highest priority to get it resolved.<p>“Ask Google to give users an easy option to view the original post.”<p>Let us start by saying that we love URLs as much as everyone else, and we tried hard to make the AMP URL scheme as usable as possible given the technical constraints of web apps.
We’re looking at ways to make the source link more discoverable and will update once that is done. AMP is super flexible in terms of how a publisher can direct traffic to their site. Typical ways to get to a publisher’s homepage (like clicking the logo) should just work and are in no way restricted. Also, make sure to check out amp-sidebar (<a href="https://ampbyexample.com/components/amp-sidebar/" rel="nofollow">https://ampbyexample.com/components/amp-sidebar/</a>) for adding a menu to your AMP pages.<p>If you are not comfortable with traffic on your AMP pages, please do not publish AMP pages. Google Search has 2 types of AMP related features:<p>Normal search: AMP does not influence ranking. Your pages will appear in the same spot with or without AMP.
AMP specific features (such as the “Top Stories Carousel”): For these features, we believe that AMP is the format that currently delivers the best possible user experience on the mobile web. That is because AMP allows for consistent speed, caching, pre-rendering, and enables swiping between full-length pages. This is a big deal for topics where there isn’t “that one best result” that a user might want to look at.<p>“Google takes away ad revenue on AMP pages”<p>AMP supports over 60 ad networks (2 of them are owned by Google) with 2-3 coming on board every week and makes absolutely no change to business terms whatsoever. There is no special revenue share for AMP.<p>“If Google cares so much about the mobile experience, why cover 15% of the small mobile screen with a fat bar at the top?”<p>The Android users might have already noticed that it is now scrolling out of the way and the same is coming soon for iOS (we’re just fighting a few jank issues in Safari). Similarly we’re spearheading a long term effort (<a href="https://github.com/bokand/NonDocumentRootScroller" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bokand/NonDocumentRootScroller</a>) to allow web apps to define how the address bar is hidden on scrolling. It looks like this will land in Chrome soon, providing even more space to web pages.
It's been known all along that Google AMP serves pages from its CDN and that Google adds a bar at the top. The author would have know as well if they had paid attention from the get go instead of bragging about their 5 minute "install". Nothing to see here, move along.
I don't know if it's because I'm using an iOS ad blocker or the sites are misconfigured, but many AMO sites simply fail to load on my iPhone. AMP has been an awful experience for me, as an end user.
"Cache-Control: private"<p>Google has to be respecting Cache-Control headers, right? Set your AMP pages to return that. Then they won't be allowed to cache them.
Ridiculous.<p>Try using www.yandex.com as your search engine, it is surprisingly good, and has less ads disguised as "search results" and results from blog-spam sites and such nonsense.
I can't wait 'till the author finds out that sometimes the browsers cache resources... These terrible browsers stealing his page impressions.
So you installed a WP plugin without doing any research and hoped it would make your pages faster by using unicorns and magic, or to quote<p>> Most importantly, I was surprised to find out that instead of redirecting users to an optimized version hosted on my server, Google was actually serving a snapshot of the page from their own cache.<p>and now you're upset that they really only made it faster via caching it, not actual magic.<p>Were you perchance born yesterday or are you just very naive...?