News Blog
The official blog from the team at Google News
AMPlifying the News
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Posted by Maricia Scott, Engineering Director, Google News
At its heart, Google News is about keeping people up-to-date with what is going on in the world and providing news from diverse perspectives. But this goal is meaningless unless we get the reading experience right. For too many people, reading the news on their mobile devices can be slow and clunky, forcing them to abandon a site. That’s why we joined others across the industry on the
Accelerated Mobile Pages Project
(AMP for short) - an open source initiative to make the mobile web as fast as possible.
In the few months since AMP launched, thousands of publishers have embraced this new format and are regularly publishing AMP-versions of their content. In February Google started making it easy to find those AMP webpages in relevant
mobile search results
, giving you a lightning-fast reading experience. Today we will be doing the same thing in Google News on all our mobile platforms -- Web, Android and iOS.
So - what’s new? At the top of the page, there is a new AMP carousel filled with important headlines and stories of the day. Users can browse up to 14 headlines there quickly, and click any article to jump into the viewer, which is optimized for fast-loading AMP articles. In the viewer, people can also swipe to continue reading other stories from the carousel. Within the regular News stream, AMPlified articles are labelled with the AMP lightning bolt icon. That way, users can know these will be fast even before they click.
Our tests have shown that AMP documents load an average of four times faster and use 10 times less data than the equivalent non-amp’ed result. In many cases these stories will load instantly. That adds up to a win for publishers and users. While we can’t expand the amount of time in the day, with AMP we can help users consume more content in the time they do have. It is also great for publishers because people will read more and click on more stories when they know they will load fast, driving more traffic to a publisher’s site.
We’re starting AMPlification with our English US Edition - more languages and editions will be rolling out soon.
Labels
announcements
30
currently in the news
13
features
43
Google News Blog
153
help for publishers
21
languages and editions
13
looking backward
7
Archive
2016
Sep
May
Apr
2015
Aug
2014
Aug
Feb
2013
Dec
Jun
Mar
2012
Dec
Oct
Sep
May
Mar
Jan
2011
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Feb
2010
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2007
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Feed
Google
on
Follow @google
Follow
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
Follow