Google on Mobile is Getting Faster

TalentZoo.com | Flack Me | Digital Pivot | Beneath the Brand

Archives | Categories

By: Jessica Cherok

Thanks to its competition with Facebook, Google is bringing faster load times to mobile. Google has announced what it calls "accelerated mobile pages," or AMP, which seems to be a clear counter to Facebook's Instant Articles (though Google hasn't commented).

The AMP project is designed to speed up the load time for pages accessed on mobile, thereby creating a more pleasant user experience. According to Google's Richard Gingras's interview with TechCrunch, AMP "is about making sure the world wide web is not the world wide wait."

Earlier this year, Facebook announced Instant Articles, where content creators could host their content natively on the social media site to cut down on load times. While native hosting has obvious benefits for Facebook's users, many content creators were leery of releasing their content to Facebook's servers.

AMP means Google is giving content publishers the option of creating the regular web page and a "light-weight" web page. The light, AMP HTML, version loads faster and may be missing some features, including ads.

Google has already partnered with several brands, including BuzzFeed, the Washington Post, and its own Twitter and Vine. The AMP project isn't available publically yet, but will be coming to the masses in the near future. As for what AMP means for search rankings, Google has noted that AMP-enabled web pages will not receive priority in search results.