Google Creates 'Dedicated Placement' in Search Results For AMP Stories, Starting With Travel Category (venturebeat.com) 42
Google says it will soon introduce a "dedicated placement" in Google Search for AMP Stories in specific categories, like travel, along with components that let AMP Story creators embed interactive content. From a report: The dedicated placement -- a carousel of visual covers from Stories -- will appear beneath the Search bar on mobile for queries like "Things to do in Tokyo" and "The top 10 places to go in Tokyo." Tapping on any of the covers will launch the corresponding AMP Story, which you'll be able to navigate using swipe gestures and scroll gestures. Swiping far enough to the left will open the next Story on the list. The new discoverability feature will roll out in the coming months on Search. AMP Story categories like gaming, fashion, recipes, movies, and TV shows will follow afterward, Google says.
Solution (Score:2)
Re: Solution (Score:1)
Different results for different keywords. When I searched "Honest Tea" I got very little. When I searched "cruel intentions" I saw lots of results. "Thomas Paine" pulled up nothing at all.
Google was cooler when... (Score:1)
Overlord, Yahoo, Altavista-- I'm not feeling lucky (Score:2)
The whole reason we all ran away from overlord and Yahoo and ALtavista was because we like the benefits of commercially agnostic search. it allowed more freedom for relevance search if it didn't have to do product placement.
remember the "i'm feeling lucky", That button is still there. it's not that I press it very often. It's just a not so subtle reminder that google isn't trying to steer me to their overlord paid product.
that is "I'm feeling lucky" will just become "Who paid to own this search term t
Re: (Score:2)
Amd what's an AMP story anyway?
To me AMP [te.com] is a connector. Or am I being too nerdy for Slashdot?
Oh lovely... (Score:2)
Promoting paywalled content (Score:2)
Special content result blocks can be very helpful for mobile users. Many times I find results that look like they would be helpful for my query, but I find that Google is promoting content that is paywalled. I get it, creators need to be compensated. Promoting paywalled content without a flag letting the user know BEFORE clicking it's paywalled leads to a poor user experience. It's disingenuous and pisses me off to no end.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, 'special', like they call the mentally disabled 'special'. Yeah Google 'special' blocks (most normal people would just call them new additional advertising blocks), will definitely help more people to switch to, https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duck... [duckduckgo.com]. Google search stopped working for me, I got this instead, https://developers.google.com/... [google.com] and it always for some reason took a huge number of tries. I suppose I got the Google 'special' search.
AMP = Accelerated Mobile Pages (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
It's the thing that slows down your page load (Score:2)
Whenenver my LTE is in some slow place what you see when you click on a google's search result is a painfully slow download that get's an AMP page, then it redirects and loads the content even more slowly. so it's two loads for the price of one. THe good news is it helps google track you and charge more. Well good if your are google that is.
Re: (Score:2)
AMP is a special subset of HTML5 which is designed to, among other things, be easy for Google to cache and serve entirely from their cache. It's also supposed to be faster because there is no blocking JS that loads.
And, by special subset of HTML5, I should point out that most of the limitations revolve around JS.
It's a standard that Google invented, and I believe still controls. Also, IIRC, it limits which JS libraries you can use (easily) so it can be used to direct people towards Angular and away from R
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm surprised this isn't already covered by their past EU enforcement actions.
This isn't just a shot in the foot, they're going to blast their whole leg off by making it easy to prove anti-competitive behavior.
Re: (Score:2)
In fact, that was why I switched to Yahoo! for my default search engine. I was on my phone, and it was impossible to get a non-AMP link to an article I was reading, if I got to that article through a Google search.
Re: AMP = CANCER (Score:2)
Yahoo! is still a thing?!??
Just show the most relevant results (Score:3, Insightful)
Google are increasingly ignoring the relevance of results and are instead focusing on how the content is delivered. First they started de-ranking sites that didn't use SSL, even though SSL isn't necessary for a lot of sites. Then they started de-raking sites that weren't optimised for mobile, even though some sites want to focus on desktop users. Now they're effectively de-ranking non-AMP sites by prioritising AMP results at the top. The relevance of the site should always be prioritised over the technology used to deliver it, but Google have increasingly lost sight of that.
Then there's Google's search manipulation to hide "fake news" and "misinformation," which seems to be based primarily on Google's California world-view, rather than on facts. As such, Google News searches tend to deliver results that promote their views while hiding all views contrary to their own. Again, relevance should be the priority, not manipulation of information.
All these things combined mean that Google is becoming increasingly ineffective as a search engine, and in many cases DuckDuckGo is generating more relevant results. Google need to focus on delivering the most accurate results, not on delivering results based on site implementation or based on their political views.
Re:Just show the most relevant results (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Just show the most relevant results (Score:2)
"Google is becoming increasingly ineffective as a search engine"
You gotta admit, that's a pretty positive outcome. Evil intentions restrained by bumbling incompetence is way better for mankind than the unfettered, efficacious evil that Google is trying to achieve.
and you get high priced tourist traps that can pay (Score:2)
and you get high priced tourist traps that can pay to be in the top 10.
Driven by the almighty $$$... (Score:3)
... queries like ... "The top 10 places to..." ... Swiping far enough to the left will open the next Story on the list. ...
I hate those. I don't mean just that they annoy me a little bit; I mean I genuinely despise that practice. I kind'a feel like it had to've started with a conversation that went something like this:
"Hey, boss. Dave produced another of those stupid "Top Ten" lists. It's honestly kind of boring... what do you want me to do with it?" -- "Aw crap. Okay, well... let's see if we can spruce it up a bit. First, let's monetize the crap out of that thing -- split every bullet point onto a new page, and douse it with tons of ads. Next, we need to advertise it with some pictures that include nearly naked girls in them -- but don't include the reference photo anywhere in the article, so that they'll keep clicking through all the way to the last page. Then toss in one of those click-bait phrases, you know, like "You won't believe..." into the title somewhere -- and of course, don't forget to inject click-bait lines at the end of each bullet page, to keep them going in case they somehow forget about the naked girls." -- "Got it boss." -- "Oh, hey! I've got a great idea! Why don't you also add another 'Next" button to that last bullet page, and direct it at Jon's "Top Ten" list, from last week! In fact, if we give a few dozen other articles the same treatment, maybe we can keep people clicking through ads on the site for hours on end!"
Or, you know... not. (But hey; at least we can thank Google in advance, for warning us all to not click on their latest "featured" crap.)