As the top online search engine in the world, Google, hopes to make the web more efficient, the company has announced a new ambitious strategy that could see most of the web switching over to a new image format. The new open-source format, called “WebP” (pronounced “weepy”), would be an alternative to the JPEG format that is already internationally accepted because of the good quality it offers with relatively small file size. The JPEG format is one of the most efficient formats due to the optimal balance of quality versus size, and Google even encourages using that specific format as the company largely only indexes JPEG pictures in its popular Google News service.

(via Google makes push to standardize new WebP web picture format | Business 2.0 Press)