The Google Discover Feed is getting a dedicated section for Web Stories, a Snapchat Stories-like feature which was announced in 2018. The feature helps publishers to post short and visually appealing content that users can skim through in their phones.
Web Stories in Google Discover is now live in India, US and Brazil and available in English and Hindi. The company has already planned to extend its availability to other regions and add support for other languages.
To check the new feature, users need to open Google app on their phone and swipe right on the home screen to open the Google Discover feed. Then after scrolling the regular news and updates, users will get to see the new Stories carousel. Users can browse through the carousel by swiping left and right and can tap on any story they want to watch.
The story would open up after tapping and users can tap on either side of the screen to cycle through the pages in the story. Swiping left will open up the next story and swiping right will take back to previous story. The feature works like Stories feature on Instagram and Snapchat but it doesn’t automatically cycle through pages. Users have to tap on the right edge of the screen to move to the next page, or else the same page will be played in a loop.
Underneath the stories of Google Discover feed, users can find publisher’s name, share button and context menu button that would let them open up the help center and send feedback. To close the open story, users have to tap on “x” icon in top right corner.
Google said in a blog post that they are working with diverse group of publishers and creation tools in India, US and Brazil to collaborate with Web Stories and build out the features. But no one needs to be a big name publisher to post Web Stories. They said that Web Stories can be made by anyone and more than 2,000 websites have published Stories which have been indexed by Google.
In order to help creators in the beginning, Google has floated some tools like Web Story Editor for WordPress, MakeStories and NewsroomAI. If someone is interested in learning more about how they can post their own Stories, they can check out new stories.google website or watch Storytime YouTube series.