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Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

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Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#121

Post by theandrewbailey »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #86
walshemj wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I look at a website its shocking how no one even does basic image optimisation using PS on the images. This is such a trivial optimisation it makes you wonder about the level of competency of the average web development company.

Is there an alternative that doesn't require a monthly subscription?

You can get some pretty good images out of almost any image editing software, even GIMP. First, know which format to use, and size your image appropriately.

For JPEGs: use chroma downsampling, and don't go above 80% quality unless absolutely necessary. If your software has a preview function, use it. Encode with MozJPEG if you can.

For PNGs: compress the hell out of them. There's several tools that can compress them further.

Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#122

Post by microcolonel »

lmm wrote: post #95
criddell wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/convert.php You can insert ImageMagick somewhere into your production pipeline. It's excellent software.

Well other than being riddled with security holes. It has its place, but never use it on user-submitted images.

While that may have been true in 2014, today it's hard to find an exploitable bug affecting a major image format parser in ImageMagick. Assuming you aren't using unsanitized user-provided parameters on the command line with it, it should be fine unless your attacker is very motivated.

Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#123

Post by [deleted] »

rebelde wrote: post #83
hannob wrote: post #70

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. 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 w…

> If you don't like AMP nobody stops you from doing the same thing. The AMP symbol tells users that the site loads quickly. Google doesn't indicate the same thing about non-AMP sites that still load quickly. Guess which site the user will tend to choose. I am not sure AMP will be optional for sites that want to get chosen.

[deleted]

Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#124

Post by freehunter »

fixermark wrote: post #108
romanovcode wrote: post #55

I think that this whole AMP thing is horrible for the web. It's like Google is not dictating how one should build/style their websites. Thanks, but no thanks. Stay evil, Google.

Google has an eye on the next billion web users---the ones who aren't on the network yet because of cost and bandwidth. Their experience will be significantly bandwidth-constrained in the short run, and AMP is one of the initiatives to provide a segment of the web that works in such an ecosystem. If the web were going in a direction to serve that demographic organically, AMP wouldn't be necessary.

But it's actively making the Internet worse for the current users. Is it worth destroying the current user base in order to attract a new one?

Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#125

Post by inimino »

Ph0X wrote: post #28
bjt2n3904 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I heard about AMP, I didn't get warm fuzzies. I didn't exactly know how or why, but something told me that the main benefactor with this technology was Google, not the user, and certainly not the content provider. I can make pages faster without AMP by stripping the needless bloat and using a proper CDN. Why do I need this tech again, besides the artificial goad of page rank?

If you're willing to put in all the work to do it yourself, and also pay for CDN (though it probably won't be as good as Google's), then feel free to do it. But yeah, nothing's free. They give you this great technology, free access to their world-wide CDN, and better organic search results, at the cost of having the X button going back to search. Though I have no idea how the author things that the "X" button should…

I also didn't understand this. If there's a quick view with a close button, where would it go but back to the search results?

Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#126

Post by shortformblog »

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.

It's not so much a shock as it is a "new normal." Whether you like that new normal, that's up to you.

(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.)

Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#127

Post by fixermark »

freehunter wrote: post #124
fixermark wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has an eye on the next billion web users---the ones who aren't on the network yet because of cost and bandwidth. Their experience will be significantly bandwidth-constrained in the short run, and AMP is one of the initiatives to provide a segment of the web that works in such an ecosystem. If the web were going in a direction to serve that demographic organically, AMP wouldn't be necessary.

But it's actively making the Internet worse for the current users. Is it worth destroying the current user base in order to attract a new one?

How is it making the Internet worse for current users?

Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#128

Post by michaelmior »

mSparks wrote: post #68
sangnoir wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That techies like me dont rely on them any more You're going to have to cite some data for that bold assertion. Lot's of techies outside of your bubble still use (and rely) on Google.

I'm drawing a distinction between use/rely and how it was previously. Does anyone still have google search as their home page? And if they do, do they use it? When was the last time you got past the first page of results? (and btw, its so rare that that people do now did you know if you get past the first couple of pages it checks whether you are a bot). Im contrasting how it used to be (reading google results making…

> did you know if you get past the first couple of pages it checks whether you are a bot

I still go past the first couple pages somewhat regularly and I don't get any sort of CAPTCHA.

Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#129

Post by mark_edward »

pk22 wrote: post #119
hannob wrote: post #70

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. 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 w…

Would you rather have an internet where every website has a design like an article from Wikipedia? Google is probably in their right to highlight pages using AMP (it's their search engine) but probably unfair.

Oh God yes please. So many sites would actually be readable. This is how you get things like Readability getting popular

Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#130

Post by buro9 »

Tepix wrote: post #99
gondo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can detect if your page is running inside iframe and if so, make the browser to load only your page, to get rid of services such as linkis.com

but does this work with AMP pages that restrict the javascript?

AMP is "HTML with some restrictions".

Speaks nothing of HTTP (otherwise they could've done the right thing and added a "text/html;amp=1" content-type).

In theory this should still work: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/X-...

But I doubt that Google's AMP cache will respect existing headers (the very nature of the cache stuff means that they won't, but what they will do to non-cache headers on an item is undefined AFAIK and so they will probably just strip them).

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