Google AMP Is Rolling Out For 1 Billion People In Asia-Pacific Region (meshrepublic.com)

meshrepublic shares a report: As per the latest announcement, Google AMP is rolling out for 1 billion people in Asia Pacific. Baidu and Sogou, which account for around 90% of the search market in China, made the announcement on the opening day of the first AMP developer conference which is taking place in New York. Also, Yahoo Japan will connect to AMP pages from their Search results. This will bring all the benefits of AMP to their 58m daily users in Japan. With the addition of these search giant's, means, a billion more people will be using Google Accelerated Mobile Pages. Per Google research, 70 percent of conventional mobile pages take seven to 10 seconds for visual page content to load. By comparison, AMP pages' load in less than one second, on average.

Comments

AMP Good and Bad.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

AMP is good in the sense, it forbids most of javascript and other gunk. AMP is a subset of full web standards. Sort of going back to the basics of HTML. In some sense it is separation of content from presentation, etc. Direct opposite of embrace-extend-extinguish, this is embrace-shrink-ignite! The AMP compatible pages live in your servers and non Google services can access it too. And a site can choose to have AMP compatible version as its only version. This could cut down the bloat. That much is good.

What is bad? The Google search results that use AMP content is accessible from Google URL. Mysite/AMP will become Google.com/Mysite/AMP. All the traffic will flow through google servers, allowing google to know even more about your browsing habits than it already does.

Google says AMP is not a page rank service, and AMP will not get special treatment. But most people won't believe it. And eventually AMP content would be considered more "trustworthy" and given higher weightage. Google has this issue of sites presenting one content to web crawlers and indexers and presenting different content to regular users. So it can decide to reduce weight for javascript heavy sites and increase weight for "plain" sites that can not play this trick easily. Ostensibly it is a persuasive argument, but it also benefits AMP pages over non-AMP pages.

AMP provides some light, Google approved API for serving Ad-content. If this AMP thing takes hold, Google will be controlling the access point of all ad-servers.

Anyway Mobile data speed in India is poor. I understand it is fantastic in Korea and Japan. Not sure about China. So this will make some impact in India at least.