Google Search aiming to catch up to Facebook Instant Articles with AMP Project
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Pulling up a news article linked from a Google search could be noticeably faster within a few months.
The Android maker plans to start sending traffic from Google Search to pages powered by the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project.
Based on a diverse architecture tapping into Javascript, HTML and open source technologies, AMP has been designed to serve up mobile-optimized content with minimal data requirements on mobile networks.
Facebook users might already be familiar with this concept through Instant Articles, the social network's innovative approach introduced earlier this year catering to readers, advertisers and publishers alike.
A developer preview for AMP has already been in the works since October, and mobile users could get to start seeing the results as soon as late February 2016.
But Google isn't the only major tech brand experimenting with AMP. Twitter plans to being testing linking to AMP-powered content in early 2016. LinkedIn also plans to utilize AMP for published content next year.
WordPress has pledged to support all publishers that want to enable AMP pages starting in January while a number of analytics providers (including Google Analytics) will have AMP support in their tools by late February.
Pinterest is already testing AMP-backed pages in its iOS and Android apps with plans to work on linking to AMP content from a variety of messaging apps next year.
Jon Parise, a software engineer on Pinterest's product platform team, touted in a blog post on Wednesday that after initial testing, the visual discovery site found AMP pages loaded four times faster and used eight times less data than traditional mobile-optimized pages on average.
"AMP is all about solving a pain point for everyone on the mobile web -- speed," Parise wrote.
Aiming to take advantage of AMP's faster load times provided through JavaScript, Pinterest also developed an AMP component enabling publishers to add Pin It buttons and embedded Pins to their AMP HTML pages.
Richard Gingras, head of news at Google, added in a separate post that AMP is also about building momentum.
Gingras concluded, "The AMP Project is working to make the mobile web experience better for everyone, and it is thrilling to be part of this industry-wide effort to reshape how content is consumed online."