An increasing number of individuals rely on their mobile devices, rather than on their laptops or desktops, to conduct web searches. Accordingly, businesses in Silicon Valley and around the world are increasing their efforts to create helpful, specialized smartphone applications. In addition, Google, a Silicon Valley leader, has announced a new search engine strategy to help people find what they need from their smartphones as efficiently as possible.
In order to bridge the gap between web searches and applications on mobile devices, Google will soon allow users to search indexes of mobile application content and link directly to those applications. For example, when a person searches for a nearby restaurant on his or her phone, the search results may return a link to the Yelp application page for that restaurant if the user has the Yelp application installed.
A major impetus for this new strategy is the revenue lost when people use their phones rather than their computers to search for information. Google loses out on a significant amount of advertising revenue through mobile searches. The new strategy has the potential to recoup some of this lost money.
