In Search of AMP Stories

Or how to find AMP stories from the news publishers...

AMP story, the visual story format built on top of the accelerated mobile page (AMP) technology, has been around for close to a year. However, it is not easy to find them on the web, even with Google search, since it is still an experimental technology.

To search for AMP stories, you can rely on the lucky fact that most publishers have the word "stamp" ("Stamp" is the name of the Google project to create a multimedia storytelling format), "ampstories", "amp-stories," or "visual-stories" in the URL of their AMP stories. For example, the URL of a CNN's AMP story typically starts with "https://www.cnn.com/ampstories/". Assuming all AMP stories on CNN follows the same URL pattern, then the Google search

inurl:ampstories site:www.cnn.com

should return all the indexed AMP story pages from CNN. This method offers the most extensive and accurate results, and here are some search links to major AMP story publishers.

• CNN: search for "ampstories" in the URL
• Washington Post: search for "amp-stories" in the URL
• BBC: search for "ampstories" in the URL

Besides relying on a search engine, we can sometimes count on an index page of AMP stories from some helpful publishers! For example,

• CNN: https://www.cnn.com/ampstories
• People: https://people.com/amp-stories/stories.html
• BBC:  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ampstories/
• WIRED: https://www.wired.com/tag/amp-stories/
• FIFA: https://www.fifa.com/visual-stories/

A big selling point of AMP story promised by Google is the promotion of AMP story in Google search results (See "Understand how AMP looks in search results" from Google). Simply searching for "CNN" on a mobile phone with Google search could show a card "Visual Stories from cnn.com" with a carousel of AMP stories. This showing of AMP stories is unfortunately not very predictable and probably depends on many factors including the freshness of the stories. While this may not be an excellent way to search for all stories from CNN, it should be useful to find the latest AMP stories.

AMP stories can also appear in your Discover feed. That is the screen you get when you swipe right on your Android's phone home screen or on google.com on a mobile device. The following screenshot shows a BBC AMP story promoted as a "Featured visual story" on a topic I am interested in. Notice the upper right icon that indicates that this is an AMP story.

Finally, we have collected some AMP stories here: https://omoiwords.com/ampstories/, which is an AMP, of course! This might be a good place to look for lots of AMP story examples until Google search provides a better way to present the collection of AMP stories!

The State of AMP Story at the Start of 2019

It is coming to a full year since Google announced the new Visual Stories format using accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) during the AMP Conference in Amsterdam in February of 2018. The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project describes AMP story as: 

AMP stories immerse readers in tappable, full-screen content. Building on the possibilities of the AMP project, this format enables the creation of visual content that is fast, open, and user-first.

A handful of publishers signed up to be their trial partners and it is interesting to see how things have progressed a year later.

Since September 2018, as part of making visual content more useful in search, AMP stories appear in a "Visual Story section" in mobile search results. That allows one to see how deeply a publisher is engaging with the format by searching for the publisher's name on a mobile phone* on Google search and see if the Visual Story section appears.

As of 2019-01-17, only two publishers have the visual story section in the search results. The number indicates the position of the visual story in the search results. This results will probably vary over time due to updates from the publishers, how successful the format is, and ultimately if Google search wishes to promote the AMP story format.

• Washington Post: 2
• CNN: 2-4

The number of AMP stories from each publisher varies, with CNN being the most prolific creator of AMP stories:

• CNN: 250+
• Washington Post: 50+
• People: 100+
• Cosmopolitan: 50+
• BBC: 30+

The number of stories is an informal tally based mostly on the publisher's stories index page such as https://www.cnn.com/ampstories/. Take this number with a grain of salt.

Regarding the quality of the story, the Washington Post wins hand down with their photojournalistic stories such as Powerless: A photographer’s journey into Yemen’s shattering war. You can also preview the experimental full-screen AMP-story desktop experience there.

The amp-story component is still designated as experimental, and may partly explain the low adoption rate as well as why many AMP story pages have excluded themselves from being indexed by search engine. Making them even rarer in search results. Time will tell if amp-story gain better adoptions when amp-story matures from its experimental status.

I personally like AMP story, even beyond its quirk of not supporting swiping to advance a page. But overall, it does not look like AMP story has proliferated.

Notes

• You can emulate a mobile phone on a desktop Chrome by enabling the developer's tool and select a mobile device.

References

• Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, 'AMP stories', https://www.ampproject.org/stories/
• Cathy Edwards, 'Making visual content more useful in Search', 2018-09-24. https://www.blog.google/products/search/making-visual-content-more-useful-search/.
• Lorenzo Tugnoli, 'Powerless: A photographer’s journey into Yemen’s shattering war', 2018-12-31. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/amp-stories/photos-of-war-in-yemen/.