Google is reportedly launching its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) initiative on Feb. 24. AMP promises to deliver content through the mobile Web four times faster and using less data than traditional pages.
Google wants consumers to stay on the Web longer and believes that one way to do so is to give them "lightning-speed" content.
"Every time a webpage takes too long to load, they lose a reader-the opportunity to earn revenue through advertising or subscriptions," says David Besbris, vice president of engineering at Google, in a blog post last October. "That's because advertisers on these websites have a hard time getting consumers to pay attention to their ads when the pages load so slowly that people abandon them entirely."
AMP will be able to deliver content at a faster rate because it will cache the Web page through the cloud even before the user clicks on a page. In other words, Google doesn't need to get the page from the publication's site whenever a request in viewing it is made.
Google wants the Web pages to deliver rich content such as animations, video and graphics along with smart ads that will load in an instantaneous fashion. The company also wants the experience to work across varying platforms and devices that include smartphones and tablets.
AMP runs on a new open framework dubbed AMP HTML, which was created out of the present Web technologies that build lightweight Web pages.
"AMP HTML is a new way to make Web pages that are optimized to load instantly on users' mobile devices," reads the AMP project page. "It is designed to support smart caching, predictable performance and modern, beautiful mobile content."
Google said it is now collaborating with almost 30 publishers from across the globe as well as with a number of technology companies. Some of the early technology partners that will soon be integrating AMP HTML pages on their sites include Pinterest, Twitter, Chartbeat, WordPress.com, LinkedIn, Parse.ly and Adobe Analytics.
Google wants to stress that its search results will not in any way show more favor to AMP-enhanced articles. The user's decision on which page to read the news will be strongly influenced by how fast the page loads.
In the months ahead, more features and functionalities are expected to be added to Google's AMP initiative. These will be focused on certain key areas that include content, distribution and advertising.
It remains to be seen how Google's AMP will totally revolutionize the user experience in mobile Web browsing. With a goal to feature each and every type of multimedia, Google believes that all of these should be available without compromising speed.
