Google rolls out Accelerated Mobile Pages for quick-loading articles

PanARMENIAN.Net - Google unveiled a new open source initiative on Wednesday, October 7, that it’s calling the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, Tech Crunch reports.

The name kind of spells out the concept: the AMP Project is supposed to result in web pages, particularly news articles that load more quickly. To achieve this, AMP publishers will follow a technical specification for faster pages, and there will be an option to serve the articles from Google’s cache.

Re/code had previously reported (correctly) that Google was working with Twitter on an open source initiative for faster-loading mobile articles. The report suggested that this would be a competitor to Facebook’s Instant Articles and other news distribution forms, but when Google’s head of news Richard Gingras was asked about Facebook today, he said the project “is about making sure the world wide web is not the world wide wait — that’s where we’re focused.”

Earlier in the presentation, however, David Besbris, Google’s vice president of engineering for search, acknowledged that nowadays, when users are reading web pages, it’s often in the context of mobile applications. That’s probably not the best situation for Google, who’d prefer that you load those pages in the browser, after you find them through search.

One reason that’s happened, Gingras said, is that many web pages are “not fully satisfying users’ expectations” — they load too slowly. AMP-optimized pages, on the other hand, should load instantly.

“Anything less than instant simply shows a degradation, a decline in engagement,” Gingras said.

So to make articles load instantly, do publishers just strip out all the crap that slows down many existing websites? Besbris said there’s more to it.

“There’s an awful lot that is in the model, in the framework, to make sure that it’s not just a really great web page, but also that it can be distributed really well — that it can be prerendered, for example,” he said.