Google has been leading the way in its open source Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project for delivering articles quickly on mobile devices, with the feature deployed to Google search results on mobile in February. Now the feature is coming to Google News on Android, iOS, and the Web.
Today it’s being rolled out to U.S. users in English, and it will become more widely available over time, Google News engineering director Maricia Scott wrote in a blog post.
“At the top of the page, there is a new AMP carousel filled with important headlines and stories of the day,” Scott wrote. “Users can browse up to 14 headlines there quickly, and click any article to jump into the viewer, which is optimized for fast-loading AMP articles. In the viewer, people can also swipe to continue reading other stories from the carousel. Within the regular News stream, AMPlified articles are labelled with the AMP lightning bolt icon. That way, users can know these will be fast even before they click.”
Above: AMP articles in Google News on Android.
While this means faster loading of news articles, it also means sending less data over the wire to people’s mobile devices. And that’s important, because not everyone has an unlimited data plan.
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Facebook has its own technology for quickly displaying articles in its app, but Google has many web properties, and now the AMP technology is becoming more widely available in a very natural place for reading articles — Google News.
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