Friend or foe? Former rivals Google and Facebook (temporarily) joined forces to conquer the mobile search market. According to a recent report, Facebook agrees to let Google mobile search inside its app so that Google’s search results can now provide deep links to the social networking giant’s content.
Google apparently wants to gain an edge against competition, while Facebook plans to lure in more users to its mobile app. Nevertheless, profile info that was not tagged as public won’t be crawled and indexed by the web search giant.
The announcement was made Friday by a spokesperson of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc. According to the deal, Google’s mobile search results will provide ‘deep links’ to limited content found on Facebook app. This will include public profile info.
The deep links will redirect Internet users to the social network’s app, the Google spokesperson said. This means that Google’s search engine for mobile devices can now index public profile info, and have access to the Facebook user’s Groups, Pages and Events.
Still, Google won’t have access to information that only a logged-in user can access or to private session content. For that data, Facebook app users can still use the app’s own search engine while connected into their accounts.
Yet, the recent less-common partnership between the two rivals may suggest that Google is really interested in expanding its search engine into the app realm. Although, its web search engine is listed as the most popular in the world, it has some limitations. So far, it wasn’t able to crawl and index info located inside apps, where mobile phone users tend to spend all their time.
Tech experts also believe that Google is fearful that its top position on mobile search market may be threatened by a competitor that can gain access to app content and provide it to the public. So, the web search giant is trying to persuade as many app developers it can to allow it to take a look inside their products.
Chris Maddern, the founder of a mobile-app firm called Button, thinks that users may lose faith in Google if the company’s search engine doesn’t provide them with all the info they need.
Yet, Facebook will also benefit from the deal. Analysts explained that people who look for something on the web would be more enticed to spend more time on Facebook app after following a deep link provided by Google.
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