谷歌测试即时新闻发布，挑战苹果FB

谷歌测试即时新闻发布，挑战苹果FB

2015年，苹果和脸书先后发布了新闻应用，让自己成为最佳的新闻渠道，为了抗衡对手，谷歌在10月7日联手30家媒体公布AMP计划，企图改善网页新闻的载入速度。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

clutter 杂乱

detract 减损

lure 吸引

subscription 订阅

specifications 规格

Google takes on Facebook and Apple with faster web-based news（557words）

By Robert Cookson in London and Matthew Garrahan in New York

Google has launched another offensive in its battle to keep news sites on the open web rather than locked in mobile apps controlled by its rivals Facebook and Apple.

The company announced on Wednesday that it was working with more than 30 news publishers,including The Guardian,the BBC and the Financial Times,as well as several technology groups such as Twitter and LinkedIn,on an initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages. Google plans to implement the technology early next year.

The aim is to make news web pages load instantly on smartphones and tablet devices. Slow loading times of news stories have been a key factor driving readers and publishers towards mobile apps,which are cleaner,quicker to load and have fewer ads.

Web pages that are cluttered with ads have spurred the growth of adblocking apps,which are threatening revenues of online publishers.

David Besbris,vice-president of engineering at Google's search division,said ads in news stories served in its new page format would not slow load times. “The ad format……makes sure the ad enhances the page and doesn't detract from it,” he said. News distribution is becoming one of the fiercest battlegrounds among Silicon Valley's biggest technology groups.In May Facebook launched “instant articles”,which allows news publishers to post stories directly into its mobile app rather than having to link back to their own websites. The offering lured publishers including The New York Times and BuzzFeed by arguing that the resultant speed would be highly attractive to readers. Last month,the Washington Post became the first news organisation to allow all of its articles to be published on the platform,saying it was able to give “readers a lightning-fast user experience”.

Last month,Apple launched its News service,which also loads articles immediately within an app.

“Every time a web page takes too long to load,they lose a reader — and the opportunity to earn revenue through advertising or subscriptions,” Mr Besbris said.

Google's initiative is designed to bring the speed of native mobile apps to the open web. The project is also open source,meaning that any publisher or technology company can use it for free.

“This is a really important moment for us to help make the web great again,” Mr Besbris said.Smartphones and tablets have been replacing desktop computers as the primary way that people access the internet,with users increasingly using apps that do not rely on the web. This shift has been a problem for Google because so much of its advertising revenue is based on web pages.

But many publishers are wary of handing over their content to Facebook and Apple's so-called “walled gardens”,whereby users are steered to those companies' own services.

Tony Danker,chief strategy officer at Guardian News & Media,publisher of The Guardian,said that accelerated mobile pages was “a project of real ambition. It seeks simultaneously to create a great user experience,to give more autonomy to publishers to deliver that and to develop effective advertising for the mobile web.”

The Google-led initiative involves creating common standards for the technical underpinnings of mobile web pages.

The code underlying the plan has been posted to GitHub,an online forum for software developers.

Many technical specifications are yet to be worked out,including how the initiative will deal with advertising and subscriptions.