Google starts showing AMP pages in mobile search results

Google announced today that it has finished rolling out fast-loading webpages in mobile Google search results as part of its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project.

These pages appear on mobile devices four times faster than the same pages built without the technology, and they use a tenth of the data. Now they’ll be showing up near the top of search result pages under a new “Top stories” heading. Once you’ve tapped on one and started reading, you can easily swipe to the left or right to go to the next story. And being able to access information quickly and then quickly go on to something else could be major.

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“We know from our experience building products at Google that users love speed,” Google product manager Rudy Galfi told VentureBeat in an interview. “We’ve seen that since the early days of search — being able to load those results just milliseconds quicker was really important to users.”

The rollout in Google search comes four months after Google first unveiled AMP at an event in New York. And it’s coming right on time, as Google executives did say at an event in San Francisco in December that this would happen in February.

The launch of AMP in such a prominent location on the Internet follows Facebook’s introduction of Instant Articles, but that program is not being handled out in the open for many types of companies to collaborate on. The AMP project has a lively GitHub repository, with 1,300 submissions of code and more than 50 releases to date, Galfi said.

Many companies have built up technology to integrate with AMP pages. For instance, there’s a WordPress plugin (of course, there’s a GitHub repo for it). Sites hosted on WordPress.com will automatically have AMP turned on, and enterprise publishers that use WordPress VIP can elect to turn on the feature and tweak it to meet their needs.

The feature should be working for all modern browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge, Galfi said.

A blog post from David Besbris, vice president of engineering for search at Google, has more on the rollout.