Google now working to make AMP a standard that everyone can use

Everyone can basically agree that Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a swell idea -- after all, we do most of our googling (and all other Internet surfing activities) through our mobile devices nowadays, and having websites load faster on smartphones or tablets certainly makes super sense.

But for all of AMP’s good things, it has one significant drawback -- it only works for a select number of platforms, such as Google, Twitter, Bing, and Baidu, just to name a few. It goes without saying that things would really be infinitely better if AMP works for other mobile websites out there, too.

Thankfully, Google is perfectly okay with that notion. As a matter of fact, the tech giant is starting a fresh campaign with the overall objective of making AMP based technology a a new web standard. The campaign will basically involve further cleaning up and polishing the current AMP platform, which will also entail the continuous improvement of processes such as pre-rendering, offline support, and locking down functionalities. Web pages that comply with the proposed AMP standard will then be treated as AMP sites and displayed accordingly when Google retrieves search results or when offering content on the Top Stories news carousel as seen on the Android mobile interface.

As revealed by David Besbris, the vice president of search engineering at Google, the search giant has always envisioned the AMP project as something that would be adopted by everybody. Of course, considering that the initiative has only been started less than three years ago, Google’s crew had to go through some baby steps. But it reckons that it has begun to gain some valuable learnings and insights along the way, which will help immensely in pushing to make AMP a web standard in the future.

For sure, the road ahead will not be an easy one. It is quite possible that Google will have to through more than one standards organization, that is aside from the World Wide Web Consortium. On top of that, standards are not usually made overnight -- the process of deliberation and fine tuning can take years.

But we get the feeling that Google does not mind taking things slow. Indeed, it is easy to forget that the AMP project is just a couple of years old. The technology itself could still use some improvements. But by launching the AMP standard campaign, Google has at least thrown the idea out there, and hopefully, help in getting the ball rolling.