With App Indexing and Google Now On Tap, Google is trying to make your whole phone an interface for search
How Google Is Taking Search Outside the Box — The I/O conference had virtual reality, photos and electronic clothes. But as always, there was search. Tweets: @dannysullivan Tweets: Danny Sullivan / @dannysullivan : This is the “it's not a smartphone but a searchphone” story I've been meaning to write: http://medium.com/... good read by @StevenLevy Expand More For Next Unexpand More For Next
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands at the midpoint of an arc our coverage has tracked since January, when Backchannel laid out how Knowledge Graph, Voice Search, and Google Now were already pulling Google past the ten-blue-links model into a mobile-dominant world. Days before this story, the same I/O keynote was read as Google poised to surpass Apple on mobile design, so search-in-the-OS is the thesis underneath the VR and connected-clothes headlines.
What makes this worth revisiting is how literally the prediction paid out: the same instinct resurfaces in Google Lens putting computer-vision search inside Photos two years later, and again in 2026 when Google rebuilt the search box itself around longer queries, uploaded media, and Gemini-powered agents. App Indexing and Now On Tap are the opening move in that decade-long migration of search off the results page.
First-order effects
- Android app developers gain a new discovery channel as App Indexing surfaces their deep-linked content in Google results, while Now On Tap lets users invoke search contextually from whatever screen they're on — making the OS layer, not the browser or the app grid, the entry point.
Second-order effects
- Apple faces pressure to match an assistant that reads any screen on the device, and app owners must decide how much of their in-app content to expose to Google's index rather than keep behind their own login walls.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — and the 2026 overhaul of the search box into an agent-driven interface suggests it did — search stops being a destination site entirely and becomes an ambient capability distributed across apps, cameras, and assistants, with whoever controls the OS layer controlling query flow.
The trend: Search is migrating out of the dedicated search box into the operating system itself, with Google using each Android release and assistant upgrade to claim that layer ahead of Apple.