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Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

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Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#201

Post by lern_too_spel »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #196
lern_too_spel wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The publisher can absolutely get by with measuring how many people viewed which RSS entries, which this can absolutely deliver. Wrong. The RSS entries are cached by the aggregators, and the publisher never sees how many people have seen them. > It seems to me that you're arguing that publishers -- or in practice, ad networks -- are entitled to track the browsing habits of specific individuals, even if (theoreticall…

> The RSS entries are cached by the aggregators, and the publisher never sees how many people have seen them. Aggregators like NewsBlur, Feedly, and Feedbin pass on subscriber counts. I am literally looking at my own FeedPress dashboard in another window right now. I promise I have the analytics I say I do, cross my heart. As for AMP, I'm not sure I see how AMP takes less control away from publishers than RSS does. T…

> Aggregators like NewsBlur, Feedly, and Feedbin pass on subscriber counts. I am literally looking at my own FeedPress dashboard in another window right now.

They do not pass them back in a standard way. If there is a new aggregator, the publisher has to integrate with them for analytics.

> As for AMP, I'm not sure I see how AMP takes less control away from publishers than RSS does.

I already told you in the very first comment you replied to.

RSS is strictly worse for publishers than AMP. Apple News is strictly worse for publishers than AMP. Apple News has some advantages (monetization, analytics) over RSS and some disadvantages (single company integration). Yet nobody on HN complains about Apple News or RSS because they don't understand the technology.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#202

Post by JohnFen »

kspacewalk wrote: post #172
MrStonedOne wrote: post #139

As a user, I fucking hate searching on mobile google now. I was trying to find some information on something, can't remember what, and all I got on the first 3 pages were amp links to news sites talking about the thing, but nothing to do with the info I was looking for. I ended up opening duckduckgo and it was on the first page. Did google just forget that static article content does not exclusively make up the inter…

I'm with you on some of those, but having one bar for URLs and search is a) great from the point of view of usability and, b) inevitable. There's just no real estate for two perfectly combinable text boxes on mobile devices.

> great from the point of view of usability

I disagree. I really, really hate when browsers interpret stuff typed into the URL bar as anything other than a URL. For me, that degrades usability.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#203

Post by [deleted] »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #113
mateus1 wrote: post #18

Google once was a force for good by indexing pages and rewarding good content with SEO. I deeply hate AMP. It's a monopolistic move to bully companies into handing over Google their content.

> It's a monopolistic move to bully companies into handing over Google their content. That's nonsensical. Google already has their content. If anything, AMP is a democratizing technology. If you want your articles in Apple News, you have to integrate with Apple. Same with Facebook Instant Articles. With AMP, you don't have to integrate directly with anybody. Just publish AMP pages from using standard HTTP, and every…

[deleted]

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#204

Post by JohnFen »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #157
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple blogs I read sell RSS sponsorships, and given that RSS feeds are, you know, ultimately web pages, analytics are relatively trivial.

> Multiple blogs I read sell RSS sponsorships Sponsorship is a poor substitute for subscriptions and ads. > RSS feeds are, you know, ultimately web pages, analytics are relatively trivial. No, the aggregator that shows the RSS results has no standard way of reporting to the publisher who viewed which RSS entries.

> has no standard way of reporting to the publisher who viewed which RSS entries.

That's a good thing.

That said, I do see an awful lot of RSS feeds that include tracking pixels, advertising JS, and all the other assorted nastiness, so I don't think RSS is precluding those.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#205

Post by JohnFen »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #189
MrStonedOne wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you still ignored the point. Google's behavior is what everybody from the linked article to the commenters here hates.

> Google's behavior And what behavior is that? Providing a publishing standard that anybody can (and do) take advantage of, including their competitors, instead of requiring direct integration like Apple News?

It's an unnecessary publishing standard, intended to replace the one that is already widely used: normal HTML.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#206

Post by JohnFen »

bsimpson wrote: post #99
rangeofmotion wrote: post #39

I really wonder about the people who work at Google. Surely they have people whose ideals are higher than this? It seems obvious that Google is a real threat to the freedom the internet originally made possible. But engineers still sign up in droves to work there? What kind of engineers are these? Do all of Google's employees simply disagree that Google is a threat? Do they not care? Are they just financially scared…

I don't work on AMP (I've never even written an AMP page); this is purely my personal perspective: The difference is trust: These AMP rants invariably look to the use of Google's CDN, or to the "google.com" domain in the address bar, and infer malintent. I presume the team had good intentions, particularly for end users. The AMP team saw a problem (websites take a stupid amount of time to load on mobile, even on nice…

> I presume the team had good intentions, particularly for end users.

I don't question the intentions of the team. I question the intentions of Google.

> for instance, they pushed forward a new web standard (packaging) to fix the address bar problem

Yes, which is a thing I object to even more than I object to AMP.

But, truthfully, here's my real problem with AMP: I genuinely hate AMP formatted pages, and they are increasingly being foisted on me. Every time I have to manually copy/edit/paste a URL to get the real page, I get a little bit angry, and I'm having to do that increasingly often. If there were some way I could opt out of getting AMP links, I wouldn't be quite so emotional about it.

There are a small handful of things about the web that make my suspect that I'll generally just stop using the web at some point, and AMP is one of those things.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#207

Post by heyyyouu »

playpause wrote: post #163
heyyyouu wrote: post #40

I'm very confused by this article -- AMP is an optional framework: https://amp.dev/ and even if you use it you can opt out of having Google load/point to it: https://support.google.com/news/producer/answer/7281462?hl=e... You don't need to no_index your site. What can you do about it? Just don't implement AMP. Yes, sites who do AMP get preferential treatment in search engines, but you can still get excellent results…

> Just don't implement AMP. ... you can still get excellent results without it; it's a very small boost. What evidence do you have that it's only a small boost? That may be the case for very specific searches. But if you search anything where there is a lot of competition between publishers (coverage of major news stories, product reviews, etc), Google serves almost exclusively AMP results, with the exception of the…

I do this for a living. As head of digital and editorial for a major publisher It's absolutely not suicide as we are extremely successful with our Google traffic without AMP. In fact MANY publishers don't use AMP -- I would say most don't (at least that I talk to). Most of us don't like the trade-offs And I talk to a lot of people who do exactly what I do (conferences, private mailing lists, etc.). And its absolutely not true that Google serves almost exclusively in AMP, as we get 80-90 percent of our site traffic from Google and, again, we don't implement AMP. Remember that page load as a factor is looked at completely independently from AMP (Google has verified this -- one of the few factors they've verified how it works), so it can help you with load but if you build your pages correctly and don't use it it's not a punishment. Even within Google news you can turn off Google pointing to AMP versions of your story -- it's an option right there you can click. So yes, I would disagree with you that not using AMP hurts you, and I've talked to publishers who have gone back and forth and that's how I know it's minor boost. But I'm just some strange on the internet so no need to listen to me -- you can believe what you want.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#208

Post by heyyyouu »

cameronbrown wrote: post #100
bluGill wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is if your competitor has an AMP page google will rank them higher than you. That will cost your money.

AMP only puts you in the top stories carousel. Speed is measured neutrally for organic search results.

THIS. I don't understand how so many people don't actually get how Google and AMP work. You don't need AMP for organic search results. It's used by Google, yes, but only for certain things AND there's ways to turn it off/point to non-AMP pages. We choose not to use it, other publishers do use it, but everyone looks at the pros and cons and then just decides. It's like any other business decision, but you have to understand how it actually works first and not just go "Oh, AMP's bad" or "Oh, without AMP my site is dead.) I don't believe either of those is true.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#209

Post by tkjef »

r3bl wrote: post #61
allknowingfrog wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it proves anything, but Kleenex is synonymous with facial tissue and Velcro is synonymous with hook and loop fasteners. I "google" things on DuckDuckGo. :)

Yeah, I've been using DDG for years, but I just can't get "Google it" out of my dictionary. I try to replace it with "Duck it", which feels stupid as fuck to say, but "Google it" doesn't feel any better.

i use "search for it".

i've completely removed said word from my vocabulary. it can be done. break yo' mind free!

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#210

Post by la_barba »

bsimpson wrote: post #99
rangeofmotion wrote: post #39

I really wonder about the people who work at Google. Surely they have people whose ideals are higher than this? It seems obvious that Google is a real threat to the freedom the internet originally made possible. But engineers still sign up in droves to work there? What kind of engineers are these? Do all of Google's employees simply disagree that Google is a threat? Do they not care? Are they just financially scared…

I don't work on AMP (I've never even written an AMP page); this is purely my personal perspective: The difference is trust: These AMP rants invariably look to the use of Google's CDN, or to the "google.com" domain in the address bar, and infer malintent. I presume the team had good intentions, particularly for end users. The AMP team saw a problem (websites take a stupid amount of time to load on mobile, even on nice…

>The AMP team saw a problem (websites take a stupid amount of time to load on mobile, even on nice phones/networks) and devised a solution

The simplest way to do this is to boost the rank of small-foot-print/fast-loading websites. That would mean websites with little-to-no-ads-or-shitty-JS-scripts will get ranked higher up. Tweak the base offset till the required performance numbers are reached.

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