Gone are the days when Google used to be the sole destination for people looking for news and other, related content. Sure, people still rely Google to do a lot of things but there is competition n the field. Smartphone applications, Social media platforms, have all offered substitutes to Google and with this, the company has been forced to come up with options. Something Google launched fairly recently and which has picked up very quickly is the AMP service. And it is getting a few updates here at the I/O event.
Google has announced that its AMP service now has over 2 Billion pages and over 9,00,000 domains associated with it. These pages are faster and thanks to Google’s preference given to faster pages, also feature near the top of the search engine queries. The AMP network is also being brought to e-commerce websites as well.
Okay, so Google has drawn a fair bit of criticism for AMP. By optimizing the user experience, Google has ensured that a section of users prefer to read content without ever having to visit the original website. This means a reduction in traffic for the websites who are actually creating the articles. Facebook does something similar with its instant articles.
AMP works by doing things like reducing bandwidth for images by 50 percent, deploying new size reduction algorithms and so on. You can not hope to compete with the company with regards to load times you see.
Meanwhile, regardless of the issues publishers may have with the service, platforms like Twitter and Tumblr are doing their best to send users that way. Tublr alone for instance, sends 340 million blogs and 500,000 domains to render in AMP. Platforms like Qzone, Weibo are also doing the same.
Google is now increasing the number of e-commerce websites that deploy its services. AMP pages will also boost the number of ads they proffer.Services like eBay, Zalado, Myntra and AliExpress are among those who are coming on-board and deploying Google’s AMP pages to tout their wares across the web.
