Google AMP from the other side
Long story short, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages are search results. Really, really rich search results.
Google Search, a popular web search engine, provides multiple kinds of search results, and Google has recently been developing and promoting new kind. Let’s first look at the plainest kind of search result. They have a title, a URL, and a description or a snippet of text.
These days there are also “rich results”, which are bigger and show more information. They still have the title and URL, but this one below, for example, has a picture of a dish that the page has a recipe for and an excerpt from the directions.
Now let’s talk about this new kind of search result. Think about the rich search results that we’ve known, but think richer. Like, as rich as possible.
What if they were much bigger? What if they were much more flexible? So that you could put anything on the result. Images, videos, uh … oh yeah, text … hmm, maybe custom fonts too. That’s everything you could possibly put on the web, right? Oh and ads! The results would be so rich people would run ads on it.
What would it look like? Title, URL, and ✨all the things✨.
Such a search result would take up the entire screen. So you’d probably have to click into it. But they’re still just search results.
How would Google implement this? They’d probably do it the same way they currently do rich search results. With some kind of special markup their crawler could pick up.
As search results, these extra-rich results are completely static between scrapes of your site, and they’re served from the search engine. Incidentally, Google’s search results are pretty fast to load. Would that be a compelling reason to put content into this very rich search result format? Should Google offer this kind of search result for the sole purpose of helping deliver content quickly?
Or maybe they started with HTML and tried to dumb it down so that they could restrict the creativity of web authoring and marginalize content creators.
My last post was about either Uninstalling extraneous language optional features on Windows 10 or System tray icon interaction guidelines. Find out which.