Google speeds news to smartphones, challenging Facebook

Google launched the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP) in October. “Now with Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles, the fragmentation becomes even greater, and it could ultimately affect readers as they may not get the same experience depending on what services they use”. Google announced that it would begin rolling out in early 2016, and sure enough it has.

Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., said Wednesday it will put websites built with its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology in front of more eyeballs by displaying the pages, when relevant, in the Top Stories section of a search results page.

“An AMP page is four times faster and [uses] 10 times less data”.

Look for a green thunderbolt in Google search results to find out which sites are part of the new project.

The move by Google to speed up mobile Internet gratification came as Facebook works to expand its “Instant Articles” program, which was launched a year ago.

Richard Iwanik-Marques, Vice President of Marketing at Revcontent, said, “The product innovations and value-added offerings Google has consistently given consumers across all web arenas makes them a ideal compliment to Revcontent on the partnership side”.

WordPress is not the only platform that the innovation would be available to, however, as Google’s AMP initiative has been embraced by a number of prominent publishers and websites already, including Twitter, Pinterest, Chartbeat, Parse.ly, Adobe Analytics and LinkedIn.

Google said that AMP search results will “soon” be released on its Android and iOS apps.

As for the company’s VIP clients like Quartz, Fortune and TechCrunch, they have the option to enable AMP for their sites. And while AMP is about much more than addressing the causes of ad blocking, Besbris said that AMP indeed does try to address problems that alienate users. “It’s also easy to quickly flip through the search results just by swiping from one full-page AMP story to the next”.

“We’ve structured the AMP page so content doesn’t get blocked by ads”. Regardless, it seems like we’re well on our way to never having to wait three seconds for a page to load.

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land.