Inside Search
The official Google Search blog
More apps in Google Search—now even easier to use
June 25, 2014
Sometimes the best answer is on a website, and sometimes it's in an app. That’s why since
last December
, when you search with Google on your Android device, you may see results from your apps that let you jump right to relevant content in those apps.
We added more apps with this capability in
April
and
May
, and this week we’ve just enabled our biggest batch yet, including apps like ABC News, Airbnb, AutoTrader, BuzzFeed, CBS, Cookpad, Crackle, Daily Mail Online, Dailymotion, The Economic Times, Fox News, francetv info, Hot Pepper Gourmet, Houzz, KASKUS, Kompas.com, musiXmatch, NDTV, Orbitz, RetailMeNot Coupons, Shazam, Strava, Subito.it, The Guardian, The Washington Post, ViewRanger GPS, Viki, and many
more
. We’re also announcing today that any Android developer can now participate in app indexing, which means that even more of your favorite apps will soon become search-friendly and can organically appear in search results—just like websites.
In addition to seeing more app content in Google search results, you may also notice that the apps now appear differently: app result title links take you directly to the content inside the app. This makes it even easier to access apps from Google. You can tell if a result will take you to an app by looking at the green text just below it. If the green text is the name of an app you've installed and has an app icon next to it, then you’ll know the result will link to an app. If the green text is a website URL, then you know the result will link to a webpage. (Remember that you have to
sign in to Search
in order to see these app results.)
Sometimes you may prefer to go to a website instead of an app, even though you have the app installed. To do this, just tap on the link to the website below the result snippet.
Finally, if you’re looking for new apps to install, you’ll now be able to find more apps through Google. We started
clustering app results together
in the U.S. last December, and now we’ve rolled this feature out globally. For example, if you’re searching for photo editors in Japanese [写真編集], you’ll see results for apps like the following:
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Posted by Toshiaki Fujiki, Software Engineer
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