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Comment by Ph0X | Hacker News Reader

If you're willing to put in all the work to do it yourself, and also pay for CDN (though it probably won't be as good as Google's), then feel free to do it.

But yeah, nothing's free. They give you this great technology, free access to their world-wide CDN, and better organic search results, at the cost of having the X button going back to search.

Though I have no idea how the author things that the "X" button should go back to the home page honestly... You open an article, you close the article. If you want to go to the homepage, you click the top banner with the logo.

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>I have no idea how the author thinks that the "X" button should go back to the home page honestly

He's not suggesting the "X" leads to the home[0] page, but to the actual "deeplink" page (blogpost, etc).

I'm not the author, but here's my idea:

Normal webpage: click result in Google, page loads (for a long time), I click reader view, read some, close reader view, explore the site.

AMP page: allows me to skip the loading time & the click on 'reader view' and start reading directly (so far, so good), but then I close "(AMP) reader view" and want to explore the site. Instead I am back at square one, exactly where Google wants me to be.

[0] https://xkcd.com/869/

You hit the nail on the head. The cost to the publisher is added discoverablility of their other content and the ad revenue that comes from it (it also hits networks like Taboola hard).

Their success becomes ever more tied to Google for the next hit.

I also didn't understand this. If there's a quick view with a close button, where would it go but back to the search results?

It's pretty straightforward to provide a link in the page content that goes to the non-AMP version of the page. Multiple other news sites already do this.

But why would you ever want as a user to go from an AMP article to the same article but non-AMP? I could see the user going to the homepage of that site to see more similar articles (or clicking on other articles on the side), but I don't see reason why they would want to see the exact same content but slowly loaded.

And again, definitely not by pressing X. Pressing X means you're done with the article. And if you're interested, you'd press the websites logo at the top to go home, not X.

The same can be said about AMP. Google is not going to port your site to support AMP for you. You have to put in all the work yourself.

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