Google starts India roll-out of Accelerated Mobile Pages for mobile search results

Google Inc. on Wednesday announced the roll-out of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) for mobile search results in India. With this new update, when users search on their mobile device, they will see a label that indicates a page is AMP’d. This doesn’t change search results but will show users which sites have pages that will load faster.

The AMP Project is an open source initiative that addresses the issue of mobile websites loading slowly and AMPs are designed to load near instantaneously. AMP also helps save data as AMPs on Google Search use 10 times less data than the equivalent non-AMP page. Today, the median time it takes for an AMP to load from Google Search is less than one second.

Over the past year, since the AMP project started, over 600 million AMP documents, in over 104 languages, have been created worldwide.

In India, several publishers have embraced AMP. These include Zomato, News 18, NDTV and Aaj Tak. Zomato specifically has seen great early results since AMPing their pages, with page load times decreasing from 3.8 seconds to well under a second.

Globally, the Washington Post has seen a 23% increase in mobile search users who return within seven days, and an 88% improvement in load time for AMP content versus traditional mobile web. eBay, Pinterest, Wordpress and Reddit are among many other publishers worldwide who have adopted AMP.

Sites loading slowly is arguably one of the most frustrating things about the mobile web. Recent Google research shows that 53% of people will leave a site that fails to load in three seconds or less. AMP is similar to Facebook Inc.’s Instant Articles and Apple Inc.’s Apple News, both efforts to speed up the rate at which articles load on mobile devices.