Google's ambitious project to speed up the entire mobile web launches today
AMP is an open source code framework, a bit like a new HTML, that Google asked publishers and developers to adopt into their websites and apps back in October. Companies on board include Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, the BBC, and The Washington Post.
AMP essentially helps those partners create lighter-weight web pages that have a reduced relaince on clunky technology such as JavaScript.
In a blog post, Google says AMP web pages load on average four times faster than normal web pages, and sometimes up to 10 times faster.
From today, mobile users searching for certain topics in the news on Google will also be presented with a "Top stories" carousel of articles that they can swipe through to get a snapshot of the big stories of the day.
Google's VP of search engineering said in the blog post: "While helping people find fast AMP content through Google Search is a significant step, there's still a lot of work ahead for the open source AMP Project. Still, it's been thrilling to see how the industry has come together to work on this common goal of making the mobile web great for everyone. And given the potential AMP holds for other types of content, we're excited about what the future holds."
Google AMP has been compared to Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News, but the project differs from those two projects in that it is inviting anyone to join the open source project - including Apple and Google - rather than creating a closed ecosystem in which to distribute publishers' content.