• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 7, 2015

Google on Wednesday introduced a way to make news articles load faster on mobile Web browsers. The Accelerated Mobile Pages project (AMP) allows mobile Web pages of news publishers who use the technology to load much faster when users search on Google. Web pages that open when people click on links inside Twitter and other social media platforms also load more rapidly.

The project relies on AMP HTML, a new open framework built from existing Web technologies that allows Web sites to build light-weight Web pages. In time, Google says more of its products such as Google News will also integrate the technology.

David Besbris, VP of engineering, search at Google, names in a post Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress, Chartbeat, Parse.ly, Adobe Analytics, and LinkedIn are among the first group of technology partners planning to integrate AMP HTML pages. He says the project now has nearly 30 publishers participating worldwide.

The goal is to solve the slow mobile Web page-load factor that Searchmetrics points to in a study released earlier this month analyzing search engine ranking factors on google.com. The findings point to less ads, fewer internal links, and fewer images to speed mobile page load times as a solution. Google, and others, don't view content restrictions as an answer to faster load times.

Rather than restrict what publishers can add to their Web pages, Google's AMP lets them use rich content like video, animations and graphics to work alongside smart ads, and to load instantaneously. The same code will work across multiple platforms and devices, so content can appear everywhere in an instant, no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device.

The service is similar to Facebook's Instant Articles that allows publishers Buzzfeed to publish stories directly to Facebook, eliminating the need for users to click outside the platform to read the articles.