> Google giving ranking incentive to sites that are faster seems like the exact sort of thing they should be doing.
Really? I thought Google's purpose was to find information in the web, not to give me fast links. If I am looking for an article, I want that article, not a different but faster one. If I am looking for a piece of information, I want the best fit, not the second or third best but faster fit.
This has not been true for more than a decade. The primary use case of the Internet today is to connect users with service providers of all stripes, and not just information repositories.
For most of these, the quality of service is more correlated with their "speed".
Information delivered slowly is less useful than information delivered quickly[1]. If there are 5 takes on an AP-wire article I want google to give me a fast site over a bloated slow site. The finer points of how they get to a fast site don't particularly matter to me.
[1] One of the nicer features of HN is that it is snappy and responsive - ime the polar opposite of many non-AMP news sites.
> If there are 5 takes on an AP-wire article I want google to give me a fast site over a bloated slow site.
I'd want Google to give me the accurate, well-researched site. When the difference between "fast" and "slow" is a matter of seconds (or often milliseconds), I'm not sure why better information delivered a few seconds later should be ranked lower.
Slower sites should be ranked lower for the same reason a dictionary that isn't alphabetized is less useful than one that is and both are less useful than dictionary.com. I'd rather have Webster than Oxford if Oxford will take twice as long and I'd rather not have urbandictionary.com over either -- hence a weighting.
Moreover that even if google could give me the canonical result[0] to my query its likely I will need to visit and view several sites to get the information I am searching for - information I will obtain faster when the sites are faster.
[0]Any ranking will be probabilistic and in all likelihood for common topics there will be multiple candidates within the expected error - why is it so great a sin to order them by accessibility?
Except that it's now giving a huge boost to websites that use a specific technology to be fast; instead of just boosting all fast websites like it used to. Sites can be fast even if they don't use AMP.
Heck, sites can be faster if they don't use AMP. Sure, most sites aren't, but it's certainly doable. AMP, aside from Google caching your site on the SRP, doesn't really do anything crazy when it comes to site performance.
this is true
> That is why AMP has been successful
This is not. If google removes ranking incentive, people will forget about AMP the next day