Google announced Today a Stories function is being introduced in the Google app for iOS and Androidwhich now reaches over 800 million people a month. In a new carousel within the app, users in supported markets are presented with a range of typable visual stories from participating publishers. This Stories may contain full-screen video, photos, and audio and may reference other publisher content if desired.
The company has been developing its own Stories product for some time. In 2018, AMP Stories were launched based on technologies developed for Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages project. The stories, which are already integrated into the mobile Google search, are intended to offer Google its own alternative to the Stories offer that can be found in other apps such as Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook. However, in the case of Google, Stories focus on publisher content.
Today, Google refers to this visual content as "Web Stories", not AMP Stories, and is initially integrating the experience into the Google search app in the US, India and Brazil.
Here, users can see the series of web stories at the top of the Explore tab that they can tap to access the story experience in full screen mode. As with stories in other apps, you can tap to go to the next page in a Google Web Story or swipe to go to another story on the carousel.
Publishers are responsible for writing their stories and have control over monetization, hosting, and sharing and adding links to Stories and Google Notes. To create these stories, the editors can use drag-and-drop tools like this Web story editor for WordPress, MakeStories, or NewsroomAI. Technical users can instead choose to code web stories themselves.
Early adopters of the format used web stories on their home page, on social channels, in newsletters, and more, and also published them on Google search, the company said.
Google has worked with a number of publishers to help them create Web Stories for Search and now with the native mobile app. Partners include Forbes, Vice, Refinery29, USA Today, Lonely Planet, Now This, Thrillist, Popsugar, The Dodo, Bustle, Input, Nylon, the Hollywood Reporter, Blavity, PC Gamer, Golfweek and many others. The publishers and Google worked together on the new product and helped expand its capabilities, Google says.
To date, over 2,000 websites have published stories that have been indexed by Google.
The update for the Google app on iOS and Android is released today.