We are always looking for ways to do things faster. These days, everything has gotten faster and faster, especially compared to any number of years ago. It looks like Google and Twitter, and 30 other publishers, are on their way to deliver web content on mobile devices much faster these days, as the Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) Project was announced on October 7th. Although similar to something like Facebook’s Instant Articles, what makes it different is that it is an open standard framework that is available to publishers. It is available to begin testing now.
A version for AMP-enabled search has been set up by Google, and only works on mobile devices. This version of AMP search won’t work for desktop search.
By following the link on your mobile device, you’ll see what looks like a standard Google home page. As you can see in an image from Search Engine Land for “today’s news,” you’ll see how it looks on the AMP-enabled page.
As you can see, there is a notice that says that this is a demo of AMP. Aside from the notice, you’ll see a carousel of articles at the top and article listings below the notice. If you click on one of the articles in the carousel, it’ll bring up he article instantaneously from the bottom of the screen.
When it comes to any of the articles below the carousel, the load time for them would be on par with regular search, as they aren’t AMP-enabled.
As of the time of this writing, I tried out the link for the AMP enabled feature, but I had no luck seeing the notice, or experiencing instantaneous article retrieval.
If there aren’t any AMP pages to display in the results, the carousel won’t appear in the results.
