Google News is one of the best ways to keep up with what is happening all over the world thanks to the content being served by numerous publishers. However, there has been a change in how we read news thanks to Facebook’s Instant Articles program which ultimately led Google to come up with its own Accelerated Mobile Pages platform which is similar in function to IA.
When Google officially launched Accelerated Mobile Pages on February 24th, they revealed that thousands of publishers have signed in to the platform. Now the Search giant revealed that they have extended that AMP treatment to Google News.
Initially, you could only see few articles in the AMP format after regular articles within Google Search. In this case however, Google will populate articles within Google News in a carousel at the top of the page. You will be able to read 14 stories quickly within the scrollable carousel in AMP format which is way faster than the traditional webpages.
Google also revealed interesting statistics regarding Accelerated Mobile Pages in comparison to traditional web pages:
- AMP documents load 4 times faster in average
- They use 10 times less data than the equivalent non-amp’ed result.
The company will roll-out these changes to Google News on Android, iOS and surprisingly on the Web where the latter we are not able currently to view AMP content. In addition, they are starting with the English US edition and Google promises they will roll that out in more languages and editions soon. The era of instantaneous loading articles is here and the potential for growth is huge since two large players in the web are driving this change.
