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Response from Google Tech Lead, Re: “Google May Be Stealing Your Mobile Traffic”

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61–70 of 204 posts

Re: Response from Google Tech Lead, Re: “Google May Be Stealing Your Mobile Traffic”

#61
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please address this question @cramforce. Why are you introducing a new and totally unnecessary display element when the back button is built right in to the browser and everyone already knows how it works? No matter how hard I try, I can't think of any good reason for this banner. But hey, to the right of that X there sure is a lot of room for placing an adsense ad! What a strange co-incidence.

The banner is needed to show the logical origin, given that the browser is still on Google.com and the article is shown in a iframe (to enable pre-rendering). Our native apps do not have this constraint and thus don't have the extra bar. I can't give you a 100% reason for the X. I know multiple UI versions were tested and this did well.

>to show the logical origin, given that the browser is still on Google.com and the article is shown in a iframe

What an amazing coincidence that this great new tech requires users to remain on google.com "for technical reasons".

Re: Response from Google Tech Lead, Re: “Google May Be Stealing Your Mobile Traffic”

#62
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The close button goes back. No. Just no. The back button goes back. Period. The close button closes modal windows overlaying the original page and originating from the same site. I can already hear you countering " But.. since the content is served from google.com due to caching, this pattern is technically correct ". Which is tantamount to saying "We serve the content. So we can add whatever the heck we want" Very…

The UI logically and visually belongs to the opening app, indeed. If the page itself opens a modal it opens on top of the bar and it's close button closes that modal.

but it's not an "opening app" ... it's a search engine. with links to other sites.

... or is it?

Re: Response from Google Tech Lead, Re: “Google May Be Stealing Your Mobile Traffic”

#63

Google has their version of the internet. Facebook has their version of the internet. As time slides forward just think of how many users won't know the real internet from these rubber doll versions. Congrats humanity. Your best invention ever and it only 20 years or so to completely fuck it up. This is why we can't have nice things.

[deleted]

Re: Response from Google Tech Lead, Re: “Google May Be Stealing Your Mobile Traffic”

#64
post #9

As a user I've learned to avoid AMP pages because the UX is horrible: * back button is broken 1/2 the time * the bar wastes 1/3 of my screen * I can no longer see what site I am on in the url * it's hard to navigate to the / of the site * I can't forward the link * being on a good network in US it solves no problem that I have What I'd really like to see is a way to opt-out of seeing AMP'ed pages in my search results…

Visiting non-AMP sites on mobile is masochistic (e.g. try searching news results). You get basically all the same problems, but also pop-unders, late loading ads, greedy javascript, autoplaying videos, and other bad behavior.

The AMP is really quite solid for the news use case, in my experience.

Re: Response from Google Tech Lead, Re: “Google May Be Stealing Your Mobile Traffic”

#65
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The banner is needed to show the logical origin, given that the browser is still on Google.com and the article is shown in a iframe (to enable pre-rendering). Our native apps do not have this constraint and thus don't have the extra bar. I can't give you a 100% reason for the X. I know multiple UI versions were tested and this did well.

>to show the logical origin, given that the browser is still on Google.com and the article is shown in a iframe What an amazing coincidence that this great new tech requires users to remain on google.com "for technical reasons".

If you have an alternative implementation strategy that enables pre-rendering and swiping while showing the source article origin I am all ears.

We can do it in our native apps, and we do.

Re: Response from Google Tech Lead, Re: “Google May Be Stealing Your Mobile Traffic”

#66

This is a good response and I appreciate Malte's effort to engage publishers, but it doesn't calm my nerves about the biggest publisher complaint about AMP: Google owns the chrome (top navigation) on all AMP pages. This makes it easy to navigate back to Google (why would you ever want to leave?) and other publishers in the AMP ecosystem, but much harder to navigate to the publisher that created the page in the first…

It's one more step along Google's path to eating the internet. Google-served content discovered through Google search rendered in Google's browser running on Google's operating system on a Google-manufactured device connected through Google's ISP and Google's network protocol (QUIC). Vertical integration.

Google is just sending a different type of traffic: "one page traffic", but let's not forget that it is Google that is sending the traffic to AMP pages in the first place, there should be no entitlement on the part of webmasters.

Re: Response from Google Tech Lead, Re: “Google May Be Stealing Your Mobile Traffic”

#67

Google has their version of the internet. Facebook has their version of the internet. As time slides forward just think of how many users won't know the real internet from these rubber doll versions. Congrats humanity. Your best invention ever and it only 20 years or so to completely fuck it up. This is why we can't have nice things.

Your response sounds more like the religious groups howling "world will end" whenever a new scientific progress is made. Internet survived because of its obvious commercial value. Google and Facebook are doing nothing new but making their ends meet.

Re: Response from Google Tech Lead, Re: “Google May Be Stealing Your Mobile Traffic”

#68

If hacker news had a speed rating next to the links I would probably click on them more instead of just reading the comments to decide if it's worth pulling up an article. Note, It has been suggested that a speed rating on Google would be equivalent to the amp experience with less Google control.

Speed also depends on where you are geographically. Amazon.com is probably faster than Taobao.com in the States, but I'd have the opposite experience over here in China. But then Google is the slowest this side of the GFW, so that might be redundant.

Re: Response from Google Tech Lead, Re: “Google May Be Stealing Your Mobile Traffic”

#70
post #9

As a user I've learned to avoid AMP pages because the UX is horrible: * back button is broken 1/2 the time * the bar wastes 1/3 of my screen * I can no longer see what site I am on in the url * it's hard to navigate to the / of the site * I can't forward the link * being on a good network in US it solves no problem that I have What I'd really like to see is a way to opt-out of seeing AMP'ed pages in my search results…

Visiting non-AMP sites on mobile is masochistic (e.g. try searching news results). You get basically all the same problems, but also pop-unders, late loading ads, greedy javascript, autoplaying videos, and other bad behavior. The AMP is really quite solid for the news use case, in my experience.

Using Firefox for Android with uBlock Origin pretty much solved that problem completely for me.
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