Google launches Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, its plan to speed up the mobile web

With the debate over ads and the speed of the mobile web growing every day, many web companies like Apple and Facebook have pushed for publishers to hand over their content in the name of a better experience for users. But content creators — for the most part — don’t want to do that, and Google knows that. So today, the Mountain View company has announced the Accelerated Mobile Pages initiative, a plan it’s leading to make the mobile web faster…

The plan aims to “dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web,” all while maintaining sites’ ability to employ Google’s AdSense ads as well as advertisements from other networks:

Today, after discussions with publishers and technology companies around the world, we’re announcing a new open source initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages, which aims to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web. We want webpages with rich content like video, animations and graphics to work alongside smart ads, and to load instantaneously. We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant—no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using.

It’s really a great idea — and you can try it out for yourself right now. Nearly 30 publishers from around the world are taking part in the project as of today, and you can even give it a test run by searching for certain queries from Google on your mobile device. Try clicking through to one of these topics, and you’ll find a scrolling carosel of articles that appear in the AMP format at the top of your search:

•  [news]
• [recipes]
• [fashion]
• [mars]
• [syria]
• [nytimes]

The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project provides an open source approach to building media-rich content for the web, using a language the company is calling AMP HTML. You can find the new open framework — which is “built entirely out of existing web technologies,” according to Google — over at GitHub. Over time, Google says that it anticipates that Google News and other products will in some way incorporate Accelerated Mobile Pages.