Google’s AMP makes inroads into Asia Pacific, partners with Baidu, Sogu and Yahoo! Japan

NEW YORK: A traditionally challenging market for American companies, China is now opening up to tech giants as Google said on Tuesday that search results in Baidu and Sogou will be connecting directly to the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

David Besbris, Google’s VP Search and AMP Project Lead made this announcement at two-day AMP developer conference in New York City.

At a session, Besbris told the audience that Baidu and Sogu, which account for around 90% of the search market in China, will be leveraging AMP. Yahoo! Japan the market leader in search locally, also said that it will connect to AMP pages from their search results.

According to a TechCrunch report, Besbris said these partnerships “tremendously increase the reach of where AMP pages can go” and help fulfill the promise that publishers can build one file that works well on every distribution platform.

In a blog post Besbris wrote: “The addition of these key distribution platforms represents a major step for the open source project which launched in October 2015 alongside a handful of publishers and technology companies all united by a common cause: make the mobile web work better for everyone”.

In October 2015, Google unveiled Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP to speed up the mobile web in an attempt to deal with the problem of the slow mobile web and counter the rise of Facebook’s Instant Articles and other similar technologies.

The Jang Media Group and its digital services firm, IMM are an early stage partner on the AMP project with Google and have leveraged the technology to speed up their entire publisher portfolio.

Google is holding its first AMP moot in New York, which can be followed on Twitter at #AMPconf.

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