Google has revamped its search engine with a new tool called ‘Instant Pages’, designed to make it easier to access from handheld mobile devices.
At a briefing in San Francisco on Tuesday, Google demonstrated Instant Pages, which allows certain Web pages to pop-up in a user’s Web browser nearly instantaneously, as well as a revamped version of its website for mobile devices.
Its new Instant Pages system will shave between two to five seconds off the time it takes for a web page to load, the company said.
Google said that traffic coming from mobile devices such as smartphones has increased by a factor of five during the past two years.
“We see all this mobile traffic growing on top of our desktop PC.L traffic,” Google Fellow Amit Singhal said.
Singhal said that consumers’ increased use of mobile devices benefits Google by allowing people to continue searching the Internet during times when searches on desktop PCs typically wane, such as after 9 p.m., during the weekends and during the summer months. “There is no summer slump” with Internet searches on mobile devices, he said.
Instant Pages works by pre-loading the page associated with the top search result in the background as a user decides what to click on.
Google relies on its relevance technology to confidently predict the number one result a user will pick.
That means when the top pre-rendered link is chosen, the web page opens instantaneously.
The search giant said it typically takes around five seconds for a web page to launch once someone clicks on it.
During a demo at the event the Washington Post home page loaded immediately with Instant Pages, compared to 3.2 seconds without it.
Google said the Instant Pages feature will initially be available as an add-on to Google’s Chrome Web browser and that it planned to make it available for mobile devices in the coming weeks.
View a video explaining how Instant Pages works below;
