Google has updated its eponymous voice-recognition search app with speed improvements the company claims will save users "a combined 6.5 million hours" this year.
"Each time you open the app or do a search, everything will load just a bit quicker," said Google VP Tamar Yehoshua in a blog post.
Not only should the app feel faster overall, says Yehoshua, news articles that show up in searches should load almost immediately, thanks to wider adoption of the company's open source Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project.
Introduced in February, the project aimed to make pages using AMP load four times as fast and use 10 times less data than traditional web pages. AMP-optimized stories are indicated by a lightning bolt icon and show up in the top stories section of search results.
In addition, the app now includes video highlights in select Google Now cards for NBA and NHL games.
Google for iOS is a free download on the App Store for iPad and iPhone. [Direct Link]
Top Rated Comments
[doublepost=1464787920][/doublepost]It occurs to me now people's prejudice to Google may be hampering their ability to understand what this is.
AMP is an open-source project designed to make the web faster for static data ('https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/about-amp.html'). Google AMP Cache (which is a separate thing) then takes these files and preloads them on their servers so they can serve this reduced-size, browser-friendly HTML file even faster. Apple can host AMP files too, if it wanted. Anyone can.
Any browser that supports AMP will recognize that there is a faster version of the same content you care about, and be able to load the page faster. Soo this isn't a Chrome vs Safari argument, not really. Google simply added support for AMP in their Google Search app on iOS so now when you use it (or more correctly, when dumb people like me who don't realize that OMG I'm the product, use it) the special pages will have the AMP icon next to them and I can choose to load that page over another, and get content faster.
EDIT: Here's more information ('https://www.distilled.net/resources/how-do-accelerated-mobile-pages-amp-from-google-work/').
I'm not giving away control to Google. They try everything to stop me using Safari (can havve ad blocking)