From the start, the Bing App (voted #5 of top 100 iPhone apps of 2016 by PC Magazine) has been designed to help you “find” and “do” faster, wherever the information is needed. With best-in-class news search and browse experiences, the Bing app helps you search for the latest news topics, accessible on the Bing homepage, on the search results page, and on the news vertical page.

 

Building on this great experience, we’re excited to share that the Bing App (for both iOS and Android) now supports AMP, an open-source initiative that makes searching, browsing and reading news even faster.

 

  

 

AMP (short for Accelerated Mobile Pages) are just like any other HTML page, but with a mobile-first approach that is defined and governed by the open-source AMP specification. AMP files take advantage of various technical and architectural approaches that prioritize speed to provide a faster experience for users. Its architecture allows for the development of web pages that are rich in content and yet very optimized and tailored for the mobile space.

 

As the results are being loaded, the Bing App detects whether the news articles have corresponding AMP pages associated with them. This all happens in the background. In case there are AMP pages associated with the article, we always give preference to downloading the available AMP page from the servers that are closer to the end user, preferably via an AMP cache for a faster experience. In case AMP is not detected, the non-AMP news article is presented to the user. For the non-AMP pages we apply a number of other performance techniques to download and render those pages optimally too. AMP does not impact our ranking algorithms in any way. Users will be able to detect the articles that have corresponding AMP pages whenever they see the AMP icon in our iOS app:

 

 
“We started experimenting with AMP in our Bing App last May and have noticed that AMP pages load, on average, approximately 80% faster than non-AMP pages” says Marcelo De Barros, Group Engineering Manager in charge of the AMP integration at Bing. “Lighter pages also translate into less data being transferred over the network, requiring less network bandwidth to be downloaded.” Our data has shown a significant increase in AMP adoption by several news publishers, and we’re happy to be collaborating in this open-source effort.