Google To Serve Up Lighter, Faster Loading Pages For Mobile Users In India

Google has provided an update on its efforts to build lighter and faster-loading web pages that it says will help people with very slow connections get better access to the Internet on their Android smartphones.

These pages, which users in India should start seeing on their Google searches in two weeks, will load on smartphones even with 2G connections, Google said in a post on its official blog Thursday. Although the sale of 3G and 4G smartphones is on the rise, the vast majority of India’s nearly 1 billion wireless connections still run on 2G connections.

“We’re exploring some new ways to speed things up. In two weeks, we’ll start to roll out a new feature which we hope will do just that,” Hiroto Tokusei, a Google product manager, said in the post. “If you’re in India, with an Android phone and on a slow connection, like 2G, you should start to see pages loading a whole lot faster,” Tokusei said.

Google added a caveat that it’s still early days, but the Internet search giant’s field tests in Indonesia showed that the lighter pages load four times faster and use 80 percent less data than before. As a result, traffic to web pages increased by more than 50 percent, the company said. For those who prefer to see the original pages, they can still choose that option at the top of the page.

The company also expects the lighter pages that load faster and improve the end-user experience to help advertisers reach new audiences. And, the pages will use “far less data, via your Chrome or Android browser from Google’s search results,” Tokusei added, in the blog post.

In a separate, related post, Google explained that it was able to find a way to make the pages lighter while retaining most of the relevant data. These “optimized” pages will always carry links to the original, heavier, versions, it said.