Google's Brin: Make smartphone apps searchable
For more than a decade, Google has reigned supreme as the main gateway to online information. — But with consumers increasingly accessing the Internet through specialized apps on smartphones like Apple's iPhone, Google's Web search engine …
Context & Ripple Effects
Brin's call lands the same day Google launches [[a:none|search-as-you-type]] Instant results — GigaOM reads the two together as Google taking a mobile-app approach to search. His stated worry is direct: consumers increasingly live inside specialized apps on devices like Apple's iPhone, and content behind those apps sits outside the index that made Google the web's default gateway for over a decade.
The obstacle he names runs straight through Apple's conduct rather than any technical gap: Ping ships without Facebook connectivity and Flash remains barred from the iPad, both held up in the coverage as examples of Apple refusing to interoperate with outside technology. Whether apps ever become searchable is therefore less an engineering problem than a negotiation with the platform owner.
First-order effects
- Content inside smartphone apps is invisible to Google's crawler today, so each session routed through an iPhone app is query volume and ad inventory that bypasses Google's core search business.
- Brin's public appeal puts immediate pressure on Apple and large app publishers to expose app data to external indexing, at the same moment Google is defending query engagement with Instant's search-as-you-type rollout.
Second-order effects
- Apple becomes the decisive gatekeeper: its track record of blocking interoperation (Ping's missing Facebook tie-in, Flash on the iPad) suggests app searchability happens only if Apple opens interfaces it has so far refused to open.
- App publishers face a fork — expose content to outside indexes for discovery reach, or keep users sealed inside their own apps — with early movers gaining search-driven distribution that closed rivals forfeit.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, search economics migrate from crawling the open web to bargaining for access to app content, converting platform owners into toll-takers on the gateway position Google has monopolized for a decade.
- The durable structure is a split internet: one searchable web layer and one walled app layer, with the boundary drawn by whoever controls the device — a contest that will shape which companies own discovery itself.
The trend: Search is shifting from indexing the open Web to indexing application content, with device-platform owners — above all Apple — deciding how much of that content the next generation of search engines may see.