Facebook allows Google to crawl and index its mobile app | Hacker News Reader

Facebook allows Google to crawl and index its mobile app

blogs.wsj.com

60 pointsMichaelCORS13 comments

>>Google’s effort to keep its search engine relevant in a world of mobile apps just got a boost from a big rival.

I see this as facebook leveraging mobile search more than google leveraging facebook to keep search relevant. But I guess that is a matter of perspective.

From Google's side I think this is about mitigating the threat of iOS 9 native app search capabilities. iOS users will build the habbit of swiping down to search for anything. Their native indexing support means Facebook results will just start popping up. Where is google in this picture? Google search needs to work great with facebook content everywhere (web, mobile, etc)

Maybe but IIRC Google announced supporting app indexing on iOS prior to Apple announcing deep link searching in iOS9 and was already supporting it on Android 2 years[0] prior despite Facebook decision to support it today.

I see this more along the lines of Google continuing their objective of getting us the information we want when we want it. Mitigating threats to competitors is just really a benefit of them continuing their innovation with search.

[0] http://searchengineland.com/google-brings-app-indexing-suppo...

Two companies working on this were Chomp and Mimvi but both got acquired.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimvi

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/chomp#/entity

How is the public web content different from the public app content?

It's not. What differs is which app displays the content once you click on a link. By indexing the app location of app content, google is able to show you results that will immediately open it in the app when clicked on from the results page, as opposed to just showing the web version of the content in a web browser.

I thought that was just based on URLs. Similarly when I open a yelp.com link in my mobile browser it asks me whether to open it using the Yelp app or the browser.

That's yelp.com detecting your mobile browser and asking whether to redirect you to a URL using its private (yelp:// or somesuch) URL schema, which the app is then registered as the handler for.

This, on the other hand, is Google sending you directly to a yelp://-or-somesuch URL.

Basically, Google is taking charge of doing the client-negotiation step, so (if this catches on) sites don't have to worry about doing that redirect themselves any more.

On (newer versions of) iOS, you don't need to send someone to, say, yelp://rest_of_url to link them to the app anymore. In iOS 9 we have Universal App Links[0] that let you perform a redirect from an actual website link into your app.

For example, if you have Twitter for iOS installed on iOS 9 and you click on a link to https://twitter.com in a Google search result, you switch into the app's main screen immediately.

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...

I fail to see the difference between this and deep linking within the app.

I think most app content is only accessible after registration. Does that qualify as public app content?

Sounds like further acceptance of the fact that G+ is dead

Another death knell for the Web? Find out next week!

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