Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic • Hacker News Board

Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#111

Post by interpol_p » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 12:25 PM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #72

> I was expecting it to cause a redirect to the original > article. Instead it redirects back to Google search > results. Say What? Well, what it does is exactly what I would expect; if clicking 'X' redirected to the author's site I would be thoroughly confused. 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 o…

I agree with your expectation of clicking the 'X' going back to the results.

But it's a bit strange, why have the 'X' there at all when the browser back button will do exactly the same thing more naturally?

Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#112

Post by ricardobeat » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 12:26 PM UTC

SlashmanX wrote: post #90

nailer wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've asked @amphtml why they're adding it: https://twitter.com/mikemaccana/status/787968936251981824

The URL bar shows "google.com" in a lot of mobile browsers (including the one in your screenshot), the bar shows the original website this content is from

Trying to fix an issue that the AMP system itself introduced.

Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#113

Post by fixermark » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 12:27 PM UTC

pcl wrote: post #34

IanCal wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And it would seem that Google goes to good lengths to make the look-and-feel appear browser-like, instead of calling out the cached nature of the response. Why would a cached website be shown looking different from a non-cached one?

The fact that it's being served out of Google's servers changes the trust model for the content. End users have no good reason to trust Google with the cached data, but people assign trust to them when they click an AMP link. There's no real indication to an end user that that data is coming out of Google's caches rather than from the content provider. I find that misleading. Typically, cached web pages come out of e…

> End users have no good reason to trust Google with the cached data

I'd imagine that end users who don't trust Google aren't using Google.

> There's no real indication to an end user that that data is coming out of Google's caches rather than from the content provider.

Users who care can see the URL and the domain for which the cert is signed. Most users do not care.

> IMO this is very different than my company or ISP doing some edge caching. It's different because it is much more of an opt-in sort of relationship...

I don't see why I can't substitute "Google" and "Bing" for "Comcast" and "Verizon" in your example.

For that matter, at least in the U.S., it's a lot easier to switch out my search engine than my ISP if Comcast starts to muck with result content. FWIW, Verizon already redirects failures of domain name resolution to itself. I don't like it, and there's not much I can do about it if I want Internet around here.

> If Google takes advantage of their monopoly position and alters AMP content, nobody except the content providers will be the wiser.

That's a fair concern, but the day Google does that is the day a media firestorm blows AMP out of the water as a trustworthy tool.

Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#114

Post by grobbles » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 12:30 PM UTC

akerro wrote: post #35

lucaspiller wrote: post #8

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? Kind of related: I recently switched my blog from Wordpress to Hugo. I found a minimal theme, but…

In the last 5 years there was NO WORDPRESS THEME OR PLUGIN that I didn't have to modify. I never saw any WP theme that comes with minified CSS/JS, handles sidebars correctly - sidebar created after post content, generated by PHP not JS, generates correct tags, even one "modern" theme had links in sidebar with "nofollow"... "SEO-friendly" plugins that make blog generation time 3-5 times longer than before, of course J…

Whole WP ecosystem is a huge pile of crap

This is the sort of noise that should be soundly knocked down when seen.

I decided to start working on my own blogging platform that will be SEO-friendly and clean

Hilarious. Doomed Project 101 right here. "Good luck."

Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#115

Post by EdSharkey » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 12:31 PM UTC

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #58

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.

In fact let's face it, half of being a techie is knowing how and what to Google

... or 'duck' a la duckduckgo.com

And knowing "how and what" to search is really teasing out of the index the magic combo of jargon, phrases, and synonyms through repeated refinements on your query. That approach works just as well on Google or ddg for me and the bang syntax on ddg for domain specific searches has really sped up some of my searches over what I used to do on Google.

Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#116

Post by catshirt » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 12:33 PM UTC

dkersten wrote: post #100

> 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 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. We move…

i question the validity of your test and/or it's application in the current context.

what I am hearing is "the average non-technical person incapable of using Google."

Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#117

Post by emilssolmanis » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 12:38 PM UTC

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

> 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.

and now you're upset that they really only made it faster via caching it, not actual magic.

Were you perchance born yesterday or are you just very naive...?

Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#118

Post by frandroid » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 12:39 PM UTC

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.

Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#119

Post by pk22 » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 12:46 PM UTC

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.

Re: Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic

#120

Post by grobbles » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 12:54 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #93

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). I would expect an un-biased search engine to rate pages with and withou…

https://www.ampproject.org/

An open source standard. And to be clear it's a minor derivative (mostly defined usaged) of those other crazy standards like HTML.

This submission is hilarious. Guy installs random plug-in without knowing what it does, then complains about theft. So incredibly ignorant, but HN today.