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Google AMP Issue: Links to visit the site currently not working

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Re: Google AMP Issue: Links to visit the site currently not working

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can disable it for now, but there are already some companies building their entire websites in AMP like independent.co.uk. A better solution than AMP would be to only consider raw page speed, and then use a neutral schema markup for whatever extra features Google wants to display in Google Search.

What's wrong with AMP websites? AMP is a fast subset of HTML. That's different from using Google's AMP cache.

A "subset of HTML" that by specification is required to load Javascript from a central CDN, and by specification will let you wait multiple seconds before it shows anything if that JS doesn't load, even if perfectly usable content is loaded already.

Re: Google AMP Issue: Links to visit the site currently not working

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're working on signed exchanges, you'll soon see the "real URL" of the content.

Signed exchanges are a terrible idea. They take control away from publishers and let large sites (AMP caches) control small sites. Google punishes web publishers with a traffic drop unless they allow Google to serve their websites from Google's servers and include Google's JavaScript. AMP, signed exchanges, and portals can't seriously be considered real standards.

Which publishers is the control taken away? You're claiming news outlets have to be super afraid of punishment if they don't do AMP. That's empirically false, many news outlets dominate (or share the dominance) markets without doing any AMP. I don't necessarily like AMP, but claiming it's the (paraphrased) "worst thing after the black plague" is also dishonest, working on alternative solutions would be the right thing to do here.

Re: Google AMP Issue: Links to visit the site currently not working

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "power in another industry" part. What part of that wasn't clear to you ? Which market is Google unfairly benefiting/profiting in, by leveraging its market share in search?

Browsers, mobile operating systems, ad networks, comparison sites, video hosting sites, image search, map services, etc., etc., etc. All of Google myriad of properties benefit from being able to limit competitors web page size, limit their technology use, restrict advertising and gating them behind your own servers. Plus on top, Google doesn't have to do any of that shit themselves and can gleefully put themselves at…

If you don't want to see Google content when you visit a web page, maybe you should visit a non-Google web page?

Re: Google AMP Issue: Links to visit the site currently not working

#224
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit plays it's own games. While they dropped the aggressive "Use app" nagging, they now frequently and purposefully (?) break back-navigation (eg. from individual posts to the subreddit) with the all too common "Oh snap. Something went wrong" and cutesy picture excuse for a dysfunctional site.

Reddit is fun now; start Tor, try to visit a soon-to-be-banned sub-reddit, enjoy Tor's tracking notifications not present on normal reddit sub-reddits. Looks like reddit is turning into one large honeypot.

Have any examples so we can see for ourselves?

Re: Google AMP Issue: Links to visit the site currently not working

#225
post #224
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is fun now; start Tor, try to visit a soon-to-be-banned sub-reddit, enjoy Tor's tracking notifications not present on normal reddit sub-reddits. Looks like reddit is turning into one large honeypot.

Have any examples so we can see for ourselves?

I'd noticed it first when they put r/watchpeopledie under a review, then later banned it. I have no crystal ball to know what are they going to ban next, but I am sure you can find some subreddits that are now quarantined.

Maybe this list would help?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...

Soon one won't be able to train NLP models on certain archetypes of speech if they continue banning everything deviating from preferred topics of their advertising/corporate sponsors :-(

Re: Google AMP Issue: Links to visit the site currently not working

#226
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think bitL is saying that reddit embeds some sort of tracking script in “soon-to-be-banned subreddits” that they don’t embed in normal subteddits, and that you can tell this from notifications within Tor

Still don't follow. Why track soon-to-be-banned subreddits differently?

Don't ask me, it's just an observation. I don't think Reddit employs imbeciles so the usual "oops, a bug there!" is unlikely. But given it's pretty easy to track a visitor across multiple social networks in real time, including their real identity, it's good to be aware of it and even being a bit paranoid about one's privacy while on Reddit.

Re: Google AMP Issue: Links to visit the site currently not working

#227
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way to think of AMP is as a solution to "When people click on links from search the pages often load very slowly. Can we make this instant?" Any preloading based solution has to involve caching, because otherwise sites could learn that they had shown up in your search results without you having clicked on then. (Disclosure: I work at Google, not on AMP, and I'm only speaking for myself)

While this might have been one of the reasons, most likely from the (sometimes rather native) perspective of devs, I still attribute mostly malice to this whole thing and hope it gets them good in the whole antitrust issue. Even if it were just that, trying to tackle slow loading pages out of selflessness on Google's side, I can only say: None of your ducking business. Make sure your pages load fast, and then that's…

> trying to tackle slow loading pages out of selflessness on Google's side

I'm not sure where you're getting "selflessness". The faster pages load from search the better people's experience of using search is. This directly benefits both Google and people who use search.

Re: Google AMP Issue: Links to visit the site currently not working

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find their first result is usually as good as Google's, but what I am looking for is invariably #3+ and DDG just falls off a cliff. And their image search is far inferior.

Interesting, perhaps my Google results are just exceptionally poor then, as if I don't see a result in the top 3 on Google then it won't be anywhere in the results. FWIW Google doesn't provide a single direct link to the data sheet for the query I posted in the first 3 pages for me. Even if I append "datasheet" to the query, the data sheet is still pushed to page 2. The only way I get the result on page 1 is to searc…

When I'm searching on my phone, it's usually something not very hackery. "heirloom vegetable seedlings Manhattan" is a pretty typical example.

Re: Google AMP Issue: Links to visit the site currently not working

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can disable it for now, but there are already some companies building their entire websites in AMP like independent.co.uk. A better solution than AMP would be to only consider raw page speed, and then use a neutral schema markup for whatever extra features Google wants to display in Google Search.

What's wrong with AMP websites? AMP is a fast subset of HTML. That's different from using Google's AMP cache.

A subset wouldn't require you to load js to use built-in features like forms. A subset would just remove features or elements, which would make the whole load a js lib to make it work superfluous.

AMP is not a subset of HTML. It's a superset of a (badly defined) subset of HTML.

Re: Google AMP Issue: Links to visit the site currently not working

#230
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you can. Put in a blocklist and turn off JS. Some pages break but many run much faster, and without the risk of malware or tracking. A strangely simple solution that people don't try. NB. the remaining animated gifs can be stopped on palemoon and I think FX with shift+escape. You occasionally gets CSS animations but they are pretty rare.

>Put in a blocklist and turn off JS. [...] A strangely simple solution that people don't try. I'm not an iPhone expert but those don't seem simple. In iOS, you can enter urls one at a time in the blocklist which is cumbersome. Obviously, this doesn't work for thousands of ad network urls. What people do on desktops is import a big hosts file but my cursory research says you can't do that on a non-jailbroken iPhone.[1…

I was thinking desktop. I should have read up on amp first. Sorry. Thanks for the thoughtful reply though.
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