Most of the time, the corporate world is a dog-eat-dog one, but every once in a while, mega-corporations can show a little heart and extend the olive branch to some of their biggest competitors.
That’s what Facebook just did by extending crawl and index access of its mobile app to Google’s search engine, a spokesman for Google’s parent company, Alphabet, told The Wall Street Journal. This will add a veritable trove of public information to Google’s already robust search engine, and as more mobile consumers continue to trend toward apps over browser-based search engines, Chris Maddern, co-founder of Button, a mobile app discovery startup, told The WSJ that the new Google-Facebook partnership was a crucial move for the search engine giant.
“In mobile [Google’s] position as the online starting point is at risk,” Maddern said. “If people lose faith that they will find things they need by searching on Google, that’s bad for the company. Anything Google can do to maintain that position is good.”
The index-able information from Facebook only extends to that which users have set as public. Any personal information protected by more restrictive privacy settings won’t be found on mobile Google searches. Still, the partnership should allow Google to access enough information for measurable results, as Facebook is reportedly counting on the traffic kickback from higher Google rankings.
“When people search for public Facebook content on the mobile Web, those who use Facebook for Android can now click through and go straight to the Facebook app,” a Facebook spokeswoman told The WSJ in an email.
According to The Verge, this won’t affect iOS users, as Google and Facebook’s partnership applies exclusively to Android mobile platforms. However, if Google is serious about remaining the standby it is on desktop in the new frontier of mobile, there may be talks in the future focused on that very goal.
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