Google Search expands AMP support in developer preview

Google today is announcing a developer preview of an expansion of its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology for delivering fast-loading articles on mobile devices within Google Search. Now if you visit g.co/ampdemo on a mobile device, you’ll see more AMP pages in regular Search results, and no longer just “Top stories” — they feature the “AMP” designation and the technology’s lightning bolt icon.

For months Google has populated Search results with news articles under the “Top stories” header on mobile, but companies other than publishers have been adopting the open-source AMP tools to make their content load faster and take up less data. (On average, Google says, AMP sites are four times faster than regular sites and consumer 1/10 of the data.) Now Google is giving people a peek at what a more fully AMP-powered Google Search what mean for the overall web browsing experience, and developers will have a way to see how their non-news AMP pages work in the wild.

Google will be rolling out this wider use of AMP in the next few months, Google AMP product manager Rudy Galfi told VentureBeat in an interview.

Above: An AMP page in Google search outside the “Top stories” section that had previously been available in Google Search.

Image Credit: Google

Interestingly, this is “not a ranking change,” Galfi said. Google did start adjusting its search algorithm last year to promote articles that are mobile-friendly on mobile, but Google’s not doing that for AMP content.

Google Search is one of a few Google properties in which the company has integrated AMP. It’s also been incorporated into the Google app for iOS, Google Play Newsstand, and Google News.

Meanwhile eBay is testing out the technology for certain mobile web pages in an e-commerce setting. Other companies that have adopted AMP include Fandango, Squarespace, Reddit, Recruit, Flipkart, 1-800-Flowers, Magazine Luiza, TripAdvisor, Disney, Genius, Food Network, Food.com, Zomato, Rakuten, Shazam, Zalando, and SegundaMano.

Google now has more than 150 million AMP documents from 650,000 domains, and 4.2 million AMP documents are published each week, a spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.

A blog post from Google software engineer Nick Zukoski has more detail.