Image: Nicholas Deleon
Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages project is an open source effort to optimize web pages so they load faster on mobile devices.While these goals are similar to what Facebook and Apple have in mind for Instant Articles and Apple News, Google is stressing that readers shouldn't have to tether themselves to a closed platform just to be able to read their favorite publications in a manner that's optimized for mobile devices."We're here because we love the web and we feel the web can be better than it is," Richard Gingras, Google's head of News, told told The Verge. "We can make the web great again."What Google isn't quite drawing attention to is that fact that if the mobile web goes away— if readers are trained to exclusively visit Facebook every time they want to read The Washington Post, for example—it will put the squeeze on Google's web-based advertising business. Google's web ad business still makes up most of the company's revenue, fueling everything from inexpensive Android phones to self-driving cars.While Accelerated Mobile Pages is initially launching as a technical preview, users can find early examples of what the optimized pages will look like by clicking here on a mobile device, then searching for a news-related topic (such as "baseball," as seen above).