Silicon Valley Fight Turf War as Google Copies Competitor’s Features

Google plans to emulate the often copied “Stories” feature popularized by Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook as the Masters of the Universe battle for users’ attention.

Copying a well-known feature that was popularized by the photo messaging app Snapchat and later adopted by Instagram and Facebook, Google has announced a number of updates including a “Stories” feature. Recode reports that Google has allowed some publishers to create Stories since February but is going to start using A.I. to create its own Google Stories which will feature in the Google search engine and image results section.

According to a Google blog post, the first initial Stories will be created around “notable people — like celebrities and athletes,” but the scope of Stories will soon expand to include a number of categories. The Stories will be created using artificial intelligence but human moderators will review stories to ensure there are no mistakes. The Google blog post relating to Stories states:

Earlier this year we worked with the AMP Project to announce AMP stories, an open source library that makes it easy for anyone to create a story on the open web. While it’s still early, we’ve seen many publishers experimenting with this format and providing people with a more visual way to get information from Search and News. To help people discover these visual stories, we’ll also begin to show this content in Google Images and Discover.

Now we’re beginning to use AI to intelligently construct AMP stories and surface this content in Search. We’re starting today with stories about notable people—like celebrities and athletes—providing a glimpse into facts and important moments from their lives in a rich, visual format. This format lets you easily tap to the articles for more information and provides a new way to discover content from the web.

Google will, of course, have to find a way to monetize their Stories feature. Facebook and Snapchat have done so by including advertising within their stories, something which Google at least initially said they would not include in their feature but is likely to appear at some point in the future.

Google is also introducing an “activity card” which will appear at the top of search results and show pages that a user has visited and queries about particular subjects which a user has searched, these will be easily deletable according to Google. Alongside this activity card will be “collections,” a way to save content from the activity card to a group of other saved items. These collections are then analyzed by Google in order to determine what new content to recommend to users.