Just look at this example: http://i.imgur.com/84FvZmA.png Notice how the news carousel is completely unrelated, and the pages do not otherwise show up in the search.
Also notice the awesome bug in Google where "Nazi flag" returns "Flag of Germany".
Oh, certainly for English results showing news results for that query is very, very relevant given what is going on in the US with people waving actual nazi flags. You can see that if you e.g. search for a flag that isn't in the news (like danish flag) there is no news result.
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.
