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Can you explain? Every time you search, do you want all of the publishers who appear on the results page to know that you were searching? Or is it that you don't want snippets to appear in the search results and just want a list of links without any evidence for why they might be good matches for your query?


This is a good example of the contradictions within AMP that limit it's usability as a technology. Unless AMP was really intended as a privacy tool this whole time and I just didn't know it, publishers probably "should" know the same amount they would get to know if you visited one of their actual pages, if you are visiting an AMP for the purpose of consuming their content rather than merely searching for it. But if that disrupts the smooth functioning of AMP, well, now we're just exhibiting an architectural shortcoming that's baked into AMPs philosophy of how to serve content.

>Or is it that you don't want snippets to appear in the search results and just want a list of links without any evidence for why they might be good matches for your query?

Is that how you feel about regular search results?


Your comment does not make any sense to me. Are we talking about the same thing? A snippet is a summary of the page served by the search engine. The publisher currently does not have any idea that a particular user has seen a snippet, so publishers do "know the same amount" as they did before with AMP, which is nothing.

> Is that how you feel about regular search results?

Regular search results have snippets.


I'm sorry that you were having difficulty interpreting my comment. It may help if you go back and note that I was making a distinction between using AMP to consume content vs search for it. Publishers normally know when their content is being consumed. Let me know if that makes sense to you.

>Regular search results have snippets.

Right, and I was asking about the search results, not the snippets that accompany them. That is to say, the part with the blue title, green link, and the few lines in black displayed from the page that are displayed ten at a time, not the snippets that accompany them at the top of the page. Unless you were just using 'snippets' as a general term to mean the same thing that I mean by search results, in which case you were just repeating the content of my own question back to me.


> Publishers normally know when their content is being consumed.

They still know when their content is being consumed. They just don't know when their content is being searched for until the user clicks their link, exactly like a snippet. Does that make sense now? My point was that search engines already show cached portions of the page. Read the parent comment of my first "snippet" comment to understand why I was making that point.




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