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Google Will Stop Letting Sites Use AMP Format To Bait and Switch Readers (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the link-baiting dept.

"Google today announced a forthcoming update to its Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, web format that aims to discourage website owners from misusing the service," reports The Verge. "The company says that, starting in February 2018, AMP pages must contain content nearly identical to that of the standard page they're replicating." From the report: Currently, because AMP pages load faster and more clutter-free versions of a website, they naturally contain both fewer ads and less links to other portions of a site. That's led some site owners to publish two versions of a webpage: a standard page and an AMP-specific one that acts a teaser of sorts that directs users to the original. That original page, or canonical page in Google parlance, is by nature a slower loading page containing more ads and with a potentially lower bounce rate, which is the percentage of viewers who only view one page before leaving. Now, Google is cracking down on that behavior. "AMP was introduced to dramatically improve the performance of the web and deliver a fast, consistent content consumption experience," writes Ashish Mehta, an AMP product manager. "In keeping with this goal, we'll be enforcing the requirement of close parity between AMP and canonical page, for pages that wish to be shown in Google Search as AMPs."

57 comments

  1. I'm getting old. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I remember when Google just indexed web pages and tried to provide relevant search results.

    1. Re:I'm getting old. by Imrik · · Score: 2

      In this case, they're still doing that. This is part of providing relevant search results.

    2. Re:I'm getting old. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I vaguely remember Google as something I used before switching to DuckDuckGo.

    3. Re: I'm getting old. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I still miss Infoseek Ultra

    4. Re:I'm getting old. by Hal_Porter · · Score: 2

      AMP started off as way to make pages load faster on mobile. I suspect it will end up with everyone hosting their content on Google servers and showing only Google approved ads. Everyone Google approves of politically that is. Anyone they don't approve of will get their content de-monetized or banned from both Google servers and Google search results. Just like Google did with Youtube videos after it bought the company.

      It's like how Microsoft went from helpful supplier of operating systems which could run on dirt cheap hardware to an abusive monopoly as soon as it got enough power to do it.

      Mind you it took ages for viable alternatives to Microsoft's OS and office suite to develop. I suspect viable alternatives to Google and Youtube will arrive much more quickly.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    5. Re: I'm getting old. by mSparks43 · · Score: 2

      i miss hotbot and geocites.

      i still remember when google would find me websites. now its sole responsibility seems to be American propaganda. I use it more like a bookmark service than a search engine these days. If i use it at all.

    6. Re:I'm getting old. by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 1

      Funny you should mention that, I was just about to send a friend a link to a story referenced on here and noticed after I'd clicked send that it wasn't the story itself but some AMP man-in-the-middle attack version courtesy of Google. How about they just turn this crap off and give us the real, original content, not Google's version of the content.

    7. Re:I'm getting old. by Jzanu · · Score: 1

      You mean a private company isn't regulated by the state to act against its interests when there is no actual reason to change anything, but that somehow makes you complain.... That isn't grounds for anything, but if you as a consumer choose to change your business interactions you can do that freely. The rest of us will just see your shallow assessment as a sign that some Ivans need to find real jobs to get off the Russian teat.

    8. Re:I'm getting old. by Hal_Porter · · Score: 1

      So everyone who criticises Google is a Russian agent? Are they all Nazis too?

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    9. Re:I'm getting old. by Jzanu · · Score: 0

      No, the Russian fascists only support Nazis in the US and Ukraine. They prefer Russian ultra-nationalists otherwise. Note also that Nazis are really a failed authoritarian group founded by ex-soldiers and infiltrated by Hitler for army surveillance before he himself let loose the real crazy and stupid.

    10. Re:I'm getting old. by Jzanu · · Score: 0

      Why are you shilling for Yandex, a Russian search engine with close ties to the Russian state-security services? Do you need more English input for your rant databases? They are out of date.

      However, Wikipedia does have legitimacy problems for the information it distributes, and doesn't belong in the top 10 of any search result that excludes "wikipedia". Britannica is superior in writing clarity, actual practical reliability, and every other metric that isn't an arbitrary one including obscure articles on yak variants as part of a generalized statistical measure.

    11. Re:I'm getting old. by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      I remember when Google just indexed web pages and tried to provide relevant search results.

      I do too, the internet sucked back then. Things had to find, services few and far between, and without search engines influencing web design we ended up with a shitstorm of stupid design tactics to try and make websites relevant.

      [insert word salad here in the hopes that this comment will show up better in search result and thus gets some good mod points]

    12. Re: I'm getting old. by rthille · · Score: 1

      I miss WebCrawler

      --
      Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
    13. Re:I'm getting old. by Khyber · · Score: 1

      "This is part of providing relevant search results."

      Google has failed to provide relevant search results so many times now that I no longer use them for web searches or shopping.

      When I type in "1/2" x 24 TPI Nut" I don't want to see fucking tap and die sets, I want to see a fucking nut.

      And the only reason I'm seeing these tap and die sets is because they're SPONSORED, so I have to go a few pages of search results deep to find what I want.

      Google's search is so much hot garbage that my fiance's Undergrad program has a special class on "ACTUALLY MAKING GOOGLE WORK LIKE IT USED TO."

      THAT is damning. When the masters of archives (librarians) think your search engine has become so much shit that they need to create a college-level class to show people how to use your complicated shit for a SIMPLE WEB SEARCH, you know you fucked up.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    14. Re:I'm getting old. by tepples · · Score: 1

      Britannica is superior in writing clarity, actual practical reliability, and every other metric that isn't an arbitrary one including obscure articles on yak variants as part of a generalized statistical measure.

      Britannica is also paywalled. Are you buying?

    15. Re:I'm getting old. by JohnFen · · Score: 1

      It is? From where I sit, it looks like the opposite of that.

      AMP is awful.

    16. Re:I'm getting old. by JohnFen · · Score: 1

      This. Google's search results have been consistently declining in quality for years now. I don't think that trend will be changing anytime soon.

    17. Re:I'm getting old. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When I type in "1/2" x 24 TPI Nut" I don't want to see fucking tap and die sets, I want to see a fucking nut.

      And the only reason I'm seeing these tap and die sets is because they're SPONSORED, so I have to go a few pages of search results deep to find what I want.

       

      I hate to defend Google, but I just did that search. Five sponsored results, all for nuts. Top organic result is in fact for a tap and die set on Amazon, with nuts on Amazon also appearing.

    18. Re:I'm getting old. by Khyber · · Score: 1

      You also forget that Google tailors shit by region. Your results may vary.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  2. I see a loophole ... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 5, Funny

    That original page, or canonical page in Google parlance ...

    Ubuntu AMP pages can show whatever they want because they're also canonical pages. :-)

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    1. Re: I see a loophole ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      -1, terrible attempted joke

    2. Re: I see a loophole ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He can't help it. He's a father.

    3. Re: I see a loophole ... by alexo · · Score: 1

      Hey, I resemble this remark!

  3. Re: Collusion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    News outlets colluded with Russian intelligence to create a narrative that Google is making a change to its AMP service? Quick, somebody alert the bastions of alternative truth, Fox News and Alex Jones!

  4. Re:Collusion by Opportunist · · Score: 1

    FACT: Nobody gives half a shit.

    FACT!111eleven!!

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  5. I like AMP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Because if something says AMP on the search result I can pretty much guarantee it's not something i want to look at and can ignore.
    No idea why, but the correlation is strong.

  6. Fix the fake matches first! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    How many sites are getting on to the front page where they have no page behind them, and the URL is nothing more than a search argument being passed to a domain? How does a page that does not exist get "found" by google's indexing? It doesn't. It's backdoor payment functionality.

  7. I miss by future+assassin · · Score: 1

    Astalavista.box.sk

    --
    by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
    1. Re:I miss by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 1

      Astalavista.box.sk

      Looks like it's still there.

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    2. Re: I miss by mSparks43 · · Score: 1

      surpassed by the hidden wiki and its brethren.

  8. ...And... by mpol · · Score: 1

    ...And... , you're on the hook.

    Google is now just as much about power as companies like Microsoft, Apple and Oracle. You should not get into bed with them that easily.

    --

    Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
  9. Not to the customer by DrYak · · Score: 0

    Yeah, but he's one of Google customers.
    And this definitely doesn't provide him with relevant results to his searches.

    That is, he's an advertiser, and this doesn't provide more eyeballs to his search trying to find the most appropriate victims to inflict his ads upon.

    (None of the customer gives a shit if the "product", i.e "the users owning the above-mentioned eyeballs" is having a better time...
    This fucking article must be yet another campain by PETA about fair treatment of farm animals...)

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
    1. Re:Not to the customer by infolation · · Score: 1

      the users owning the above-mentioned eyeballs

      In the not-to-distant-future your eyeballs will actually be owned by some google-glass-style faceless corporation, and licenced back to your skull in return for mandated advertising consumption.

  10. In the meantime... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    In the meantime our business moved location 8 months ago, and despite various requests, Google is still failing to update our Google Maps entry. It does nothing with the requests. It is impossible to contact a human being. They don't give a f**ck. What a shitty company. But I'm glad the advertising/privacy selling company wants to police the web, seems like great way to spend their time.

  11. It's a lie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    AMP is about Google trying to hoover up the web's content and host it themselves to harvest all the data they can and deny this valuable resource to website owners. Oh, and only Google advertising platforms are properly supported in AMP.

    The claim that AMP is about speed is spurious. AMP pages are fast, but that is because they are stripped down, with many parts of the HTML/JS/CSS standard removed. If you build a version of your website as stripped down as an AMP page, the performance difference is a wash. These removed functionalities happen to include pretty much everything that a publisher can use to make money without Google.

    1. Re:It's a lie by Hal_Porter · · Score: 2

      Doesn't surprise me. Nor does getting called a Russian Nazi shill for pointing it out.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    2. Re:It's a lie by slick7 · · Score: 1

      Doesn't surprise me. Nor does getting called a Russian Nazi shill for pointing it out.

      Keep "bait and switch" where it belongs, in the hands of car dealerships and politicians.

      --
      The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
  12. The Death of AMP? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I hated AMP as soon as it arrived because you need to develop and maintain two completely separate websites basically, a horror show. And one of those websites -- AMP -- is completely non-standard.

    You can't even use server-side includes or an included CSS page, all the CSS has to be hard-coded into the head on the page.

    This is why many people wrote a smaller AMP "teaser" page that simply linked to the full HTML5 version.

    They're disallowing that tactic now and hopefully that will kill AMP once and for all. Who wants to maintain a hard-coded AMP website? And what about all the AMP "teaser" pages out there already, will they be disallowed?

    By the way, I never found any speed difference whatsoever between AMP pages and our regular HTML5 pages, despite all the server-side includes in the latter. If you write good, clean, validated code, rather than the garbage on most websites, you're fine.

    My feeling is that this new dictum will kill AMP for sure this time. If webmasters simply said "No" to AMP, it would die.

    1. Re:The Death of AMP? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What I find annoying is that Google employees came up with many of the libraries that Google is now trying to kill with AMP such as AngularJS / Angular and so on.

  13. Pot Kettle Black by RDW · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I really wish Google, apparently with the collusion of the websites, would stop shoving AMP down my throat in the first place. Since they helpfully nuked text reflow on zoom in the Android libraries, I've been using Opera as my main mobile browser because it fixes this. Except for AMP pages, where I'm stuck with their fixed format until I tap through to the original page. How about a 'load canonical page' setting in the google search options?

    1. Re:Pot Kettle Black by coofercat · · Score: 1

      I've got to agree. "AMP - load complete and utter shit faster than you can with HTML!"

      I'd love to just turn off AMP altogether, or at least have a "view normal mobile version" always available. I'm not sure there's ever been a time I've clicked on an AMP link and not wished I could just use the normal site. For that matter, I wonder why some news outlets are using AMP - if you go to an actual website, there's at least a small chance you might stay there. AMP doesn't really 'take' you anywhere, so there's nowhere to stay either. In other words, it means you're back to Google search results quicker than you're onto more content on the site (and then there's the adverts that sites love to plaster their sites with that don't make it onto AMP).

    2. Re:Pot Kettle Black by link-error · · Score: 2

      There is a little link icon at the top right that you can click to go through to the actual page.

      --
      -Unresolved symbol? Byte me!
    3. Re:Pot Kettle Black by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 3, Informative

      I'd like never to see the mobile version of a site even on a mobile device. Wikipedia is *especially* annoying in this regard, choosing to disregard completely my UA's built-in "show normal version" option.

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    4. Re:Pot Kettle Black by RDW · · Score: 1

      Yes, but that's another two taps to get to the actual page.

    5. Re:Pot Kettle Black by pots · · Score: 1

      The Firefox mobile version (or IceCat, if you're getting it from fDroid) has an option for this built-in, one that I find myself using most of the time. Works fine with Wikipedia.

    6. Re:Pot Kettle Black by sl3xd · · Score: 1

      How about a 'load canonical page' setting in the google search options?

      Yeah, but then other surveillance companies will monitor you, instead of just Google.

      AMP was created as a response to Facebook's "Instant Articles," which is pretty much the same idea, but with Facebook as the surveillance company instead of Google.

      Apparently, it's not acceptable to serve ads without a few megabytes of javascript spyware, which is why the "mobile web" hard performance issues to begin with.

      --
      -- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
    7. Re:Pot Kettle Black by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 1

      I use FF on my phone, and, no, it doesn't.

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    8. Re:Pot Kettle Black by pots · · Score: 1

      It does for me... Hm. Okay, it looks like maybe the reason that it's not working for you is because your mobile network provider is blocking desktop sites. In which case it has nothing to do with the browser. Try it over wifi and see if it still doesn't work.

    9. Re:Pot Kettle Black by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 1

      It has nothing to do with my Internet connection. It has everything to do with the fact that, if Wikipedia detects that you're using a phone or tablet, it redirects you to m.wikipedia.org, and you have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the fucking page and choose "Desktop view" and it blissfully ignores FF's "Request desktop site", which no other fucking site on the fucking Internet seems to do. It is completely un-fucking-called for, and fucking arrogant as hell.

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    10. Re:Pot Kettle Black by pots · · Score: 1

      Once again: it works fine for me. Looking at Wikipedia right now on my Android tablet - I requested the desktop site, and that's what I got. Using my home wifi. If it's not your ISP then I don't know what your issue is, but maybe you should look deeper.

  14. If you want to get a nut, that's a different site by raymorris · · Score: 1

    > I don't want to see fucking tap and die sets, I want to see a fucking nut.

    When you want to get a nut, might I suggest xvideos.com

  15. AMP is actually worse by allo · · Score: 1

    On mobile they just feel useless, but on the desktop it totally scales up to the full browser window (hey, your device is 6 inch, isn't it? 22 inch? I do not believe you!) and no site ever implements redirects from mobile to desktop versions, only the other way round. Then the mobile users share urls with you and you have to figure out where to remove "/amp/", "m." or similar parts of the url.

  16. Goodbye AMP (and good riddance!) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I guess now the teaser in the AMP page will have to link to the "canonical" page that has the same teaser that links to the actual page with the real content (maybe use a little Javascript to swap in the correct link). Users are gonna *love* all that extra clicking.

    Never saw the point of AMP anyway. Google should have simply extended mobile Chrome to support Chrome extensions and then install an ad blocker by default. That would solve the majority of performance issues. AMP is a workaround for the real solution: Let users control what content they want to see via browser extensions.

    Also, with AMP, you lose page view tracking, which was probably the point of using a teaser: To count the number of visitors to the website to know what content is working and what isn't. AMP generally takes away page views and therefore useful knowledge.