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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Google promises publishers an alternative to AMP [techcrunch.com]

Google's AMP [ampproject.org] project is not [ferdychristant.com] uncontroversial [theregister.co.uk]. Users often love it because it makes mobile sites load almost instantly. Publishers often hate it because they feel like they are giving Google too much control in return for better placement on its search pages. Now Google proposes [wordpress.com] to bring some of the lessons it learned from AMP to the web as a whole. Ideally, this means that users will profit from Google's efforts and see faster non-AMP sites across the web (and not just in their search engines).

Publishers, however, will once again have to adopt a whole new set of standards for their sites, but with this, Google is also giving them a new path to be included in the increasingly important Top Stories carousel on its mobile search results pages.

"Based on what we learned from AMP, we now feel ready to take the next step and work to support more instant-loading content not based on AMP technology in areas of Google Search designed for this, like the Top Stories carousel," AMP tech lead Malte Ubl writes today. "This content will need to follow a set of future web standards and meet a set of objective performance and user experience criteria to be eligible."

Also at Search Engine Land [searchengineland.com] and The Verge [theverge.com].

Related: Kill Google AMP Before It Kills the Web [soylentnews.org]
Google Acquires Relay Media to Convert Ordinary Web Pages to AMP Pages [soylentnews.org]
Google Bringing Accelerated Mobile Pages to Email [soylentnews.org]

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