Google just announced that search results in Baidu, Sogou and Yahoo Japan will be connecting directly to Accelerated Mobile Pages.
AMP, which was first announced in 2015, is the Google-led open framework for creating articles and other web pages that load more quickly — think of it as a way for regular web pages to stay competitive with fast-loading distribution channels, particularly Facebook Instant Articles
It seems like Google is making a big push into the Asia Pacific region — in fact, it says Baidu and Sogou collectively account for 90 percent of the search market in China.
The announcement was made on-stage this morning in New York City, at Google’s first AMP developer conference. During his keynote presentation, Google Vice President of Engineering David Besbris said these partnerships “tremendously increase the reach of where AMP pages can go” and help fulfill the promise that publishers can build one file that works well on every distribution platform.
“[AMP pages are] the same as the web,” Besbris said. “That’s not typically the case in the distribution platforms.”
Other services that already support AMP include Bing, Pinterest and LinkedIn. In fact, Besbris said that on LinkedIn, AMP articles see a 10 percent increase in time spent reading compared to non-AMP articles. And he said Yahoo-owned Tumblr will be rolling out AMP support to all Tumblr blogs.
Besbris also noted that while AMP was initially just for news stories, it has since expanded into other areas like e-commerce. He even showed off a messaging app built in AMP — not that that’s the project’s real purpose. (“It wasn’t intended to build applications, it was intended to build content sites.”) Still, it illustrates Besbris’ point that AMP can work with a number of different content types, not just static articles.
