The author seems to completely misunderstand the point of AMP. It was never designed or created for dynamic, interactive content, especially e-commerce.
This is like complaining that a hammer is bad for driving screws.
There are many people out there demanding their eCommerce websites "get on AMP" ASAP. The author is performing a valuable service to employees of such people.
Doesn't eBay use AMP? The issue is how you use it. I believe eBay uses it for the entry product page, and then any subsequent hit goes to the website itself.
Same for Reddit; it's a heavily abridged version of the post with maybe 5-10 comments. Then when you actually want to read the comments...you end up on full-scale Reddit instead of just going there in the first place.
I'm really not sure what I'm supposed to be getting out of these sorts of implementations if I'm in "researcher" mode.
I don't think its that. Its that AMP is borderline an anti-trust. But the point is, even with the speed and possible ranking boost, does it boost conversions? More traffic without conversions generally does not help an e-commerce site.
Yeah, but load speed is, and imagine how skewed and unfair it is for Google to load an AMP page from its own cache and compare that to loading a page from someone else's (possibly objectively faster) site. And Google doesn't consider AMP pages cached from sources other than Google to be real AMP pages.
The carousel ranks in position one if it is determined to be the best result. It can rank way below. https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook is a good way to see that.
Original article was about e-commerce. The Top Stories carousel is not relevant to e-commerce since it only contains news articles.
You're taking the guidelines for the Google AMP Cache. Do you have any sources showing that an AMP page hosted by CloudFlare is demoted compared to on hosted on Google?
First, how is it anti-trust? And second, it's been shown that faster page loads = better conversions since your bounce rate drops. This is especially true for mobile.
Imagine the scenario, a user lands on the AMP page and a user lands on a responsive page. Both have a question about shipping time. The AMP user has to navigate to a contact form to ask, then submit. The responsive user can just ask in the chat window on the page.
> The AMP user has to navigate to a contact form to ask, then submit. The responsive user can just ask in the chat window on the page.
Why would you use an AMP page for that? It was specifically NOT designed for those use cases.
Now back on your point: if the users who have a question are a small % of the total users, why would you have all users load the heavy chat window on mobile devices with limited screen space?
