The team responsible for Google’s web search and its user interface, in particular, appear to be contemplating a small change to how the search engine displays AMP results. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) have been appearing in search results for quite some time, appearing with the word AMP, in muted gray, next to a lightning bolt. Pages appearing with that marking are slimmed down and optimized for viewing on a mobile device. The new changes to Google Search appear to be specifically designed to make the underlying purpose of AMP-marked pages more clearly discernable and to help those results stand out from others on the search page. As of this writing, it should be mentioned that the changes here have not been widely implemented and only appear to be undergoing testing. So users shouldn’t be too surprised if they don’t see the changes for themselves on any of their devices.
As to what the changes actually entail, there are two major adjustments that are immediately obvious – based on screenshots captured by Jonathan Jones and shared to Twitter. First, the subtleness of the gray color originally used in the text marker has been replaced by a bright blue. That’s a really small change that should make a huge difference in the visibility of enhanced web pages to users of the search engine. Taking things a step further, Google has changed the AMP moniker itself. Rest assured, the underlying improvements are almost certainly still based on the same, original AMP at its core, as the company itself hasn’t announced any new improvements either to or using the open-source project. However, the company has replaced the word “AMP” with the word “Instant,” which highlights – arguably much more clearly – exactly what that encircled little lightning bolt logo next to the search result actually means for the page in question.
It bears repeating at this point that not many users are likely to see this change at all and, as will all things still undergoing testing, the new UI may never actually see distribution to all devices or users. There are also likely to be other changes made before it is ever officially released, as the teams at Google continue to look for the best way to present the enhanced pages to users.
