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

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

#181

Post by Asooka »

lucaspiller wrote: post #113
rakoo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know the cool thing about this integration ? Any part can be replaced. Some instantly, some take more time because they involve physical stuff. People use the Google integration because it's there by default, not because they are locked-in.

At the moment yes you are right, but if we want it to stay that way we need to do something about it now. I agree that people mainly use Google because it's the default, but if we aren't careful there won't be an alternative left that can stand up against them. The only hope we'll have then is that Facebook, Apple, Amazon or Microsoft decide to tackle Google head on, but in most cases where that has happened in the p…

Between Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, who do you want to be the overlords of the web? Each one of them is trying to win total dominance and eventually one will. Google seem like they would be the least evil of the five.

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

#182

Post by bhartzer »

One of the problems here is that when users click on a search result (marked AMP in Google's SERPs), they expect to visit a website. Instead, they visit a cached version of the page, on Google's site.

This is deceiving.

If Google's going to cache the page, then there should be a "cache" link so the user knows that they're clicking on a cached version of the page. Otherwise, deliver the user to the site that they think they're clicking on.

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

#183

Post by patmcguire »

jacquesm wrote: post #180
cyrusshepard wrote: post #3

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…

There were some search engines that displayed their results in an iframe rather than by going to the link directly. This was a very bad move and angered users tremendously. It's interesting to see how Google is trying to revive this concept through the backdoor of providing the user with a faster loading page. What with mobile being set to be a larger portion of visitors to websites at some point in the future this m…

Digg tried the same thing, back when Digg was a thing. It didn't go over well, but they didn't have nearly the same power that Google does.

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

#184

Post by chillingeffect »

sk5t wrote: post #10
dingo_bat wrote: post #2

So basically this guy says all of the issues are by design and you can choose not to use amp if you don't like all of it. Google isn't going to penalize non amp pages in search ranking. They are just going to not show your page in the carousel. I think it's a pretty fair position to take. If you don't like amp don't use it. We'll see if amp catches on over a period of time.

"Gosh, I mean, you have a right to sell oil, sure, but maybe if you play by our rules, you'll have an easier time shipping it on the rail networks we own." It's plainly Standard Oil-style monopoly behavior from Google here.

> monopoly

I'm still surprised so many people here are using google and not duckduckgo. I use the duck all day long. I used to revert to google when I couldn't find when I want, but I've found in the last six months, if it's not on ddg, it's not going to be on google, either!

We don't have to support google. Let's just stop giving them everything for free. People sneer at using Yahoo for mail, but what is the problem, really? It's almost all aesthetic.

Why give away our power and beg google to throw away profit and treat us right?

Persuade your friends to use other email and search providers. Design your websites so they have Links sections your visitors can navigate instead of going back to google. That's what I do and it works.

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

#185

Post by cramforce »

shostack wrote: post #133
cramforce wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody is currently doing that: An external contributor is currently building first class support for "My simple ad network that just wants to put an image with a link on the page" https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/5541 There are other ways to do it, though.

I've heard a lot of discussion in the ad community around how this limits competition of ad networks. Yes, it is awesome you have many on board for launch, but what of the ones who are not? Is there a publicly available process for getting included along with guidelines to set reasonable expectations for whether one will be included? If so, I'd love a link.

See https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/ads/README...

I think with the numbers of ad tech companies coming on board every week one can safely say that the process is working for them.

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

#186

Post by adenner »

wyldfire wrote: post #171
goda90 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a part that already can't be replaced while keeping all the others. Google Fi only works with Nexus devices. It could be a lack of OEM interest, but who knows what Google does that might keep it that way.

Google Fi is an MVNO, one that entered into an area with arguably insufficient competition. Regardless of how you might rate the level of competition before Google Fi entered the market, it has definitely added ambitious customer-oriented features. Its device-dependence exists because it's a unique dual-provider MVNO (Sprint and T-Mobile). This allows them to broker the best deal for the end consumer. But the bar is…

It actually is now Sprint, T-Mobile, and US Cellular.

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

#187

Post by jetpacktuxedo »

Sindisil wrote: post #158
antocv wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bing is still using Google as its backend. www.yandex.com is a really good alternative, I found it even offers better search results for most topic I look at.

Bing doesn't use Google as its back end ... I don't believe it ever did. Yahoo did switch to using Bing as its back end, some years ago.

Not that I agree with your parent comment that bing still uses google results on the backend, they did at least used to: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses...

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

#188

Post by e12e »

rakoo wrote: post #95
mintplant wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You know the cool thing about this integration ? Any part can be replaced. Some instantly, some take more time because they involve physical stuff. People use the Google integration because it's there by default, not because they are locked-in.

They've already made it hard enough to make sure legit email ends up in the inbox of a gmail-recipient, rather than being silently flagged as spam -- that anyone hosting their own mail needs to consider if they need to special-case delivery for gmail recipients (I've considered routing gmail-destinations through authenticated smtp to gmail via a gmail-account - then realized that that was just silly and I feel better when gmail doesn't work -- but I don't depend on delivering my (private) email for revenue). Add to that the fact that google is one of few big email providers that are hard to grey-list (or rather automatically white-list once delivery has started) -- and they've already made a great effort of siloing off one of their arguably most open services.

If you think the megacorp that doesn't do customer support is going to be any easier to dislodge at other levels in the stack, once they manage to squeeze themselves in by undercutting the market, I'm afraid you're hopelessly naive.

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

#189

Post by xg15 »

yoz-y wrote: post #104
wmf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The extra chrome appears to be displayed in browsers but not in the Google app. On Android it's more natural to search from the app; I don't know what the situation is like on iOS. I still don't understand why it's mandatory to use the Google CDN, but I probably don't want to know.

According to AMP documentation anybody can build an amp cache. But probably nobody did so yet. Also google will most probably link only their cache from the results. But it seems possible that you could build an AMP CMS that would use the advantages only for you, although I do not see much interest over well written HTML.

I agree. You'd have fast-loading pages - but you can get that by just writing decent HTML. What you likely won't get is Google's preferred handling in search results.

The one upside I see is that Google-moderated AMP pages might push ad networks and library developers to develop less bloaty solutions to stay compliant. Those solutions might make it easier to develop regular non-bloaty pages as well.

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

#190

Post by xg15 »

djur wrote: post #21
sk5t wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Gosh, I mean, you have a right to sell oil, sure, but maybe if you play by our rules, you'll have an easier time shipping it on the rail networks we own." It's plainly Standard Oil-style monopoly behavior from Google here.

It seems more like UPS saying "hey, we'll ship whatever you want (within reason) but if you can fit it in one of our standard box sizes it'll get there faster and cheaper". What is the ulterior motive or side benefit Google gets from people adopting AMP? Honest question.

Them becoming a "platform" where don't just link to content but can actively host, curate and present it.
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