Back in the Summer eBay revealed that they had been experimenting with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), a technology led by Google.
The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an open source initiative that embodies the vision that publishers can create mobile optimized content once and have it load instantly everywhere. Up until now it’s been publisher based content providers who have trialled AMP, eBay are the first major non-news site to implement AMP.
Today eBay announced that users around the globe will start seeing eBay AMP links in Google search results and experience instant loading.
eBay say that they have close to 15 million AMP-based product browse pages, but not all will appear as AMP right away as the feature is ramped up gradually. If you see an AMP related page in Google search there will be a lightening bolt alongside the search result telling you that the page will load instantly.
eBay are still working on this new technology and have identified three areas they want to address in the short term:
AMP pages are fast, but what about the subsequent pages the user visits? Currently when users click on a link in the AMP page, a new tab opens to load the destination page. eBay are talking to Google about how to avoid the new tab and continue the experience in the same window.
AMP content is served from Google AMP cache. For popular product queries eBay users always see fresh content but for rare queries a few users may end up seeing stale content. There is an AMP component (amp-fresh) in the works to fix this.
eBay have an AMP version for when searching in Google, and a non-AMP version for when searching within eBay. In the future eBay may choose to have one mobile version (AMP) and serve it to all platforms.
