Last year, Google announced the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) program in an attempt to make mobile browsing faster and more efficient. The project was a great success. Considering that AMP is an open-source initiative, many other web companies, including eBay and Disqus, started testing and implementing it on their platforms. Microsoft, with its Bing engine, was also one of the few that adopted AMP early on.
The company first started testing out the service in May this year. Today, the company has announced that AMP pages will finally be available in your Bing results. The service has been made available on the Bing application for both Android and iOS, but there is a slight catch here.
The only web pages that are currently being AMPed by the tech giant are news articles, including the News carousel. Users will get even more support for AMP in the coming weeks. However, you must content yourself with faster loading news for now.
In case you didn’t know, identifying an AMP page is quite simple. Just look for the little gray and white lightning bolt icon.
We started experimenting with AMP in our Bing App last May and have noticed that AMP pages load, on average, approximately 80% faster than non-AMP pages.
says Marcelo De Barros, Group Engineering Manager in charge of the AMP integration at Bing.
Lighter pages also translate into less data being transferred over the network, requiring less network bandwidth to be downloaded.
Google, the progenitor of AMP, announced this week that it has started to show AMP pages across all search results when they’re available, and not just news as it did initially. We can expect Microsoft to follow the same pattern and Bing results to also get more flexible, given time.
Also, AMP pages won’t be ranked higher on the Bing search results page just because they’re faster (an approach also adapted by Google). While this was hailed as a strange decision by some, it could be updated later. However, search engines focus more on relevancy than the speed with which a page loads, so the policy may just be here to stay as well.
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