Google and Facebook are big tech rivals but the two companies are making ‘search’ even better. Facebook has just allowed the search giant to finally crawl and index pages from the mobile app. Google search results will now include those from the Facebook app as long as relevant and contain information that the searcher is looking for.
The results on Google will appear as deep links to Facebook. This development is not surprising as Google can always index any page in the web that are made public and open to robot crawlers. Locked content cannot be indexed so private Profiles, Pages, Groups, and Event won’t come up on the results. You can only see them while within Facebook and if an account is set to public.
The Facebook social network is so big that there’s about a billion active users each day. That means more content are produced each day (even if senseless or trivial). Google uses algorithm. Facebook opening up to Google crawlers only adds to the billions of pages being indexed by the search engine.
The main benefit from this development is the fact that Google can search within mobile apps. Google has already mastered the Web but not the mobile search game yet. Soon, more apps can be crawled and indexed, giving more pages of content.
On mobile, most people search on Google so the company needs to work on improving how it indexes the search, at least, only those that need to come up on a mobile device. The idea is for people to search for keywords and then results that are linked to mobile apps can be found.
VIA: WSJ
