Google Wants To AMP The Entire Mobile Web With 'User First' Open Standards

Google is nothing if not ambitious. After achieving search dominance, the company has extended its tentacles into various other markets, including everything from broadband fiber connectivity and self-driving cars, to flying balloons in remote regions to bring Internet access to remote areas. So what's next on Google's agenda? The sultan of search wants to transform the mobile web through its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project.

AMP is Google's effort to build a "user-first" mobile experience that ultimately loads pages quicker on smartphones and tablets. For the past two years, the focus has centered on areas of Google's own search, such as the Top Stories carousel. Going forward, however, Google essentially wants to expand its AMP network, noting that content needs to follow a set of future web standards and meet a set of objective performance user experience criteria.

"We started working on AMP because we were seeing the mobile web feel clunky and slow, falling behind the tightly-integrated, highly-optimized user experiences that walled garden platforms can offer. Yet we also knew there wasn’t a fundamental technology problem: you could build great experiences on the web with the right knowledge, resources, and management support," Google stated in a blog post.

As an open source project, Google has been able to ramp up its AMP project with weekly releases and frequent adjustments based on publisher and user feedback. It is continuing to do that, but also wants web standards organizations to embrace what the company is doing.

"We are taking what we learned from AMP, and are working on web standards that will allow instant loading for non-AMP web content. We hope this work will also unlock AMP-like embeddability that powers Google Search features like the Top Stories carousel. Meanwhile, AMP will be Google’s well-lit path to creating great user experiences on the web. It will be just one of many choices, but it will be the one we recommend. We will continue to invest heavily in AMP," Google added.

How Google's efforts are embraced (or not embraced) will be interesting to watch. The message from Google seems to be that it wants to be a part of the standards process, not necessarily lord over it, though it's understandable that standards bodies might be hesitant to buy into what Google is pitching.