Here’s how it looks: Search for a hotel in a city, and you can explore the HotelTonight results from inside the search results without having to download the app.
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The company has recruited a select group of apps to allow all of their content to be searchable and “streamable” when people Google something on their smartphone.
That’s important for Google given mobile’s growing dominance. Now, as apps become more central to people’s digital lives, Google is looking to bring a few of that technology back to the Web. “Today, you’re more likely to be searching on your mobile device, and the best answers may be buried in an app … perhaps one that you don’t even have installed yet”, the company acknowledged. If you built an app, Google would show it in relevant results, provided that you also built matching Web content. Quickly, this reached Google-sized scale, with over 100 billion app pages indexed, as search SVP Amit Singhal shared at the Code/Mobile Conference.
The biggest hurdle will be persuading more software programmers to design apps that work with Google’s indexing system, which enables deep links into apps so that they can be included in Google’s search engine.
So Google has now turned its attention to mobile-only services.
“To the user, it feels like they are just using the app but what’s really happening is the app is getting run and executed on our Google Cloud Platform”, Patel tells Mashable. If the test is successful, Google will expand it, he said. But now Google has another way: stream the entire app to your phone.
Google has the clear lead.
Still, the stakes are high.
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It’s still up to the developers to price their apps, though the move does pressure app makers to lower their prices.
