Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP Project, is heading to Baidu, Yahoo Japan, and Sogou, with Baidu backing Google up on bringing the optimized experience to other search platforms. The AMP Project’s expansion was announced at the very first AMP Developer Conference, which took place in New York. David Besbris, Google’s Vice President of Engineering, made the announcement. According to Besbris, expanding to Sogou and Baidu alone will mean that AMP pages will be available to some 90% of online search users in China. The expansion does not directly ape Google’s approach to AMP integration, instead taking advantage of the fact that the AMP framework is open-source to allow full integration with the other search services.
On stage, Besbris also announced that Yahoo’s Tumblr blogging platform will soon be rolling out AMP support for all blogs, and that AMP is helping to get LinkedIn articles about 10% more reader engagement on average. He also showed off a messaging app made in AMP, stating that while such things are not the platform’s original purpose, it should serve as proof that AMP can support almost any content through its combination of flexibility and advanced compression and server-side algorithms. The support for a wide range of different content has brought AMP into competition with dedicated content delivery platforms, and into just about every category of website on Google, including the likes of e-commerce and media consumption sites.
AMP support is available to any sites indexed on Google who want to incorporate it, and Google is determined to work with Baidu, Yahoo Japan, and Sogou to ensure that the technology works the same way when they roll it out; one of the goals of AMP was to allow web page developers to create a single product and have a consistent user experience without having to create multiple variants of their site. AMP’s open nature and ease of use give it a distinct advantage over dedicated platforms like Facebook Instant Articles, which web developers usually have to build specifically for, or build the original page around the capabilities of the platform in order to avoid having incongruency in the user experience across platforms, or facing down bugs.