Google has announced an open-source project, which could result in a mobile web free of slow loading woes. Almost 30 publishers from around the world are taking part in the project as of today, and you can even give it a test run by searching for certain queries from Google on your mobile device.
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Compared to Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles, Google doesn’t require publications to jump through various hoops to have content syndicated.
“Every time a web page takes too long to load, they lose a reader – and the opportunity to earn revenue through advertising or subscriptions”, said David Besbris, vice-president of engineering at Google’s search division.
For advertising, Google assures that the AMP HTML will not change ad networks nor disrupt user experience. With this new initiative, the content on the micro-blogging site will load faster and make more people join the website. 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.
The platform, called Accelerate Mobile Pages (AMP), is an open source project that companies including Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest have already signed up to as partners. According to the company’s spokespersons, the same content distributed on Google search results, on Google Now, and on Google News will appear now on mobiles.
In addition, AMP files can be cached in the cloud in order to reduce the time content takes to get a user’s mobile device. “The optimal speed [of content delivery to consumer devices] is instant”, said Richard Gingras, Director of News and Social Products at Google. It also doesn’t steal traffic away from websites or force certain advertisements upon readers and publishers, meaning it’s a far more flexible approach that the news-protection rackets that Apple and Facebook are touting.
That was perhaps a reference to Facebook and Apple News, which are both closed systems that aim to keep readers, and advertisers, within their site no matter what content they are consuming.
Beta partners include BuzzFeed, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Financial Times, Vox and the Daily Mail. However a developer preview of the open source code behind it has been made available on the GitHub code versioning repository.
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A demonstration of AMP showed news articles displayed in search that included a large image, the publisher’s logo and a short introduction, with the ability to scroll through from left to right – described as a “carousel of content”.
