Update: I wrote the post originally without the word NOT in the title. I apologize — I jumped to conclusions here and didn’t understand what Google is doing.
Apparently, this is part of the open source Google Amp, and publishers opt into the Top Stories bracket. So Google is not stealing anything here, since full consent is given. There are still concerns whether Amp is a good thing, but the consent part changes everything (of course, since Google is a monopoly one websites are pressured into giving this concent … but the picture is much less black & white than I originally painted it).
Google recently rolled out a new Top Stories feature. I encountered it today when searching for SpaceIL (kudos for the launch guys!). In response to my search query from my android Chrome, Google displayed, right at the top of their results, a new “Top Stories” box with relevant articles. So far so good.
When I clicked on the first result on my mobile, by space.com, I am taken to this page:
Did you notice anything weird about this page? Think about it for a second.
…
That’s right, the URL is on google.com, not space.com.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.space.com/amp/israel-lunar-lander-long-trip-moon.html
Google’s Top Stories results on mobile don’t lead to the external domains, but rather to an internal Google silo/mirror. The same is true for other Top Stories results I tested (this does not seem to reproduce on desktop).
Why is this important?
Google is a search engine. People expect to find results in actual 3rd party sites when clicking on a search result. These google.com sites are all exact mirrors of the 3rd party site, but when people share these pages with others e.g. on social media, they will share the google.com site, not the original. I don’t know if this has SEO impact (it might on other search engines, I don’t know how Google relates to this). But what’s definite is that Google steals analytics information that rightfully belongs to other websites. I want to share that site, not Google’s mirror — and most users won’t even notice they’re sharing the wrong site, because they look identical except for the URL.
A lot of companies try to keep users on their platforms and services in various ways, Google is certainly not the first — but this strikes me as extra nefarious, both because Google used to be about “Don’t be Evil” (in the last few years they removed that motto), but also because this is a very twisted and counter-intuitive way for a search engine to function.
