Google's Android search now pulls content from apps you haven't installed

Thanks to Google search on your Android phone, you can not only bring up search results from the web, but also content from apps that are installed on your phone. Soon, however, that capability will be extended to apps you haven't downloaded at all. Google has announced today that thanks to its app indexing efforts, you may now start to see Play Store suggestions in your search results that'll lead to relevant content. So, for example, say you're searching for "Michelin star restaurants" on your phone. You'll not only get the usual search results for that, but also see suggestions for apps like OpenTable or Yelp if you don't already have them installed. If you do install them, the first thing you see when you launch them is a list of, yep, Michelin star restaurants in your area.

Rajan Patel, a principal engineer from Google, tells us that the company started to index content within apps almost two years ago. Developers would implement the app indexing API in their apps, which would then deliver the relevant deep link info to Google. "As of today, we've indexed over 30 billion deep links in apps," says Patel. "We're able now to understand and index the content of those deeplinks, and rank them organically on search results." As you might imagine, plenty of apps have signed for Google's app indexing already; they include Airbnb, Twitter, Yelp, OpenTable, Trulia, Pinterest and yes, Engadget as well. The app index is still smaller than Google's web index, of course, but it should still be decent enough for you to find exactly what you're searching for... as long as you have an Android phone.