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Comment by snek | Hacker News Reader

The reason I have gotten from google employees is that the top stories carousel preloads content, and that in order to preload content without leaking a user's searches, google needs to serve their own cached version of a page. in order to make sure that cached version of a page isn't doing anything tricky, they need to heavily limit what it can do.

it's not about making the internet faster, it's about making it easy for google's stupid scroller.

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That's a bit circular. The carousel predates AMP, so they somehow knew how to manage this in the past.

Sure they did — partnerships and whitelists. Is that what you would prefer?

I believe AMP to be a sort of trojan horse that leads to a fragmented internet. A way for Google to have some degree of a walled web garden. So yes...I'd prefer almost anything else. If you're signing a contract to be part of it, at least you know what is happening, and can read the terms.

Yes. Since I automatically ignore anything in the carousel anyway, I'd much prefer that AMP be nonexistent regardless of what that means for the carousel.

but the carousel didn't preload content before amp

It also didn't hijack the page header, back button, and left/right swipe actions on other people's pages.

Another thing might be that this way Google can observe user's behaviour: how much time they spent reading the article, what part did they read carefully etc. which is only possible if the user stays on Google's domain.

Throwaway for a Google search engineer here. I can tell you we aren’t interested in that at search as a signal, but publishers who are interested can run their own analytics through our platform. I’m not aware of any that do it to that level of granular detail.

It would seem odd for Google to focus on that level of detail unless they’re producing the content. They know what you searched for, what content is on the page and if/when you came back to Google. How long you spent on a specific paragraph or image doesn’t seem like it would help Google improve search or target ads better.

It does help with improving search, though, because you now have data that shows that the words in that paragraph are somehow closely related to the search term. This is relevant data to feed into the ML models.

> it's not about making the internet faster

Are you saying preloading content _doesn't_ make the internet faster?

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