Google Launches AMP Stories To Bring 'Story' Format To Mobile

Google has announced AMP Stories, the company’s newest addition to its Accelerate Mobile Pages on the web. Like Snapchat or Instagram stories, AMP Stories bring in the same format when delivering news and other updates from online publications.

“AMP stories are built on the technical infrastructure of AMP to provide a fast, beautiful experience on the mobile web. Just like any web page, a publisher hosts an AMP story HTML page on their site and can link to it from any other part of their site to drive discovery,” Google said on its Developers Blog. “And, as with all content in the AMP ecosystem, discovery platforms can employ techniques like pre-renderable pages, optimized video loading and caching to optimize delivery to the end user.”

Google said that it has collaborated with a number of online publications to bring AMP Stories to the mobile web. CNN, Conde Nast, Hearst, Mashable, Meredith, Mic, Vox Media and The Washington Post are the very first batch of publications that are using the new AMP Stories format. AMP Stories are also available to all developers who want to try it out for their own websites. Google has setup a tutorial as well as a documentation to help developers get started in making their own AMP Stories.

For regular users, AMP Stories are accessible on Google Search on their smartphones. Users must first go to g.co/ampstories using any mobile web browser and search for any of the publishers listed above. This will bring up the standard looking Google search results page. However, when users scroll down, they should be able to find the new “Visual Stories” section, as pointed out by 9To5Google.

Users will only have to tap on any of the stories to start viewing AMP Stories. Navigating AMP Stories is pretty similar to how users navigate Instagram Stories or Snapchat Stories. Tapping on the right side progresses the story forward, while tapping on the left third of the screen will move back the story.

Some AMP Stories will include sound. To mute it, users will just have to tap on the small speaker icon on the upper right corner of the AMP Stories interface. Once a user is done viewing an AMP Story, swipe down from the top to return to the Google search page.

When Google first launched AMP in 2016, it was a simple way to speed up browsing on the mobile web. With AMP Stories, Google is now giving users more reasons to stay on its search engine and keep on browsing.