Google and the Mobile Traffic Matter
October 20, 2016
I read a couple of writes up about “Google May Be Stealing Your Mobile Traffic.” Quite surprisingly there was a response to these “stealing” articles by Google. You can read the explanation in a comment by Malte Ubl in the original article (link here).
I noted these comments in the response to the stealing article:
- Mr. Ubl says, ““stealing traffic” is literally the opposite of what AMP is for.”
- Mr. Ubl says, “there are audience measurement platforms that attribute traffic to publishers. They might in theory wrongly attribute AMP traffic to the AMP Cache (not Google) rather than to a publisher because they primarily use referrer information. That is why we worked with them in worldwide outreach to get this corrected (where it was a problem), so that traffic is correctly attributed to the publisher. If this is still a problem anywhere, AMP treats it as a highest priority to get it resolved.”
- Mr. Ubl says, “AMP supports over 60 ad networks (2 of them are owned by Google) with 2-3 coming on board every week and makes absolutely no change to business terms whatsoever. There is no special revenue share for AMP.”
- Mr. Ubl says, “The Android users might have already noticed that it is now scrolling out of the way and the same is coming soon for iOS (we’re just fighting a few jank issues in Safari).”
AMP is, therefore, not stealing traffic.
I went back to my 2007 monograph “Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator,” and pulled out this diagram from a decade ago:
The user interacts with the Google, not the Internet for certain types of content. The filtering is far from perfect, but it an attempt to gain control over the who, what, why, when, and where of information access and delivery. © Stephen E Arnold, 2007, All rights reserved.
I offer this diagram as a way to summarize my understanding of the architecture which Google had spelled out in its patent documents and open source technical documents. (Yep, the GOOG did pay me a small amount of money, but that is supposed to be something you cannot know.) However, my studies of Google — The Google Legacy, Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator, and Google: The Digital Gutenberg— were written with open source content only.
Now back to the diagram. My research suggested that Google, like Facebook, envisioned that it would be the “Internet” for most people. In order to reduce latency and derive maximum efficiency from its global infrastructure, users would interact with Google via services like search. The content or information would be delivered from Google’s servers. In its simplest form, there is a Google cache which serves content. The company understood the cost of passing every query back to data centers, running each query, and then serving the content. Common sense said, “Hey, let’s store this stuff and knock out unnecessary queries.” In a more sophisticated form, the inventions of Ramanathan Guha and others illustrated a system and method for creating a sliced-and-diced archive of factoids. A user query for digital cameras would be handled by pulling factoids from a semantic database. (I am simplifying here.,)
In one of my unpublished presentations, I show a mobile phone user interacting with Google’s caches in order to eliminate the need to send the user to the source of the factoid.
Perhaps I misunderstood the technical information my researchers and I analyzed.
I don’t think Google is doing anything different today. The “stealing” idea comes from a person who finally takes a look at how the Google systems maximize efficiency and control the users. In order to sell ads, Google has to know who does what, when, where, and under what circumstances.
Today’s Google is now a legacy system. I know this is heretical, but Google is not a search company. The firm is using its legacy platform to deliver revenue and maximize that revenue. Facebook (which has lots of Xooglers running around) is doing essentially the same thing but with plumbing variations.
I am probably wildly out of step with youthful Googlers and the zippy mobile AMPers. But from my vantage point, Google has been delivering a closed garden solution for a long time.
My Google trilogy is now out of print. I can provide a fair copy with some production glitches for $250. If you are interested, write my intrepid marketer, Benny Kent at benkent2020@yahoo.com.
Stephen E Arnold, October 20, 2016
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