Google wants to extend its search dominance to smartphones. The answer is to offer you a way to use apps without downloading them to your phone, starting this week.
Here’s how it works: If you search for, say, a cheap hotel using Google’s app on a smartphone powered by the company’s Android software, it will show you search results from around the Web like normal. But there will also be information from apps like Hotel Tonight, the San Francisco-based app for booking last-minute rooms.
If you tap a button, Google will open up the app so you can book a room, even if you don’t have it installed on your phone. It seems like magic, particularly to those of us who have waited for that agonising length of time between tapping “install” and being able to open an app on our phones.
Google is actually using a bit of trickery. The company is streaming a video to your phone from the Internet while the app runs in a computer many miles away.
But there’s a catch. For now, Google can only do that with nine apps: Hotel Tonight, Weather, New York Subway, My Horoscope, Daily Horoscope, Visual Anatomy Free, Useful Knots, restaurant finder Gormey and national-parks guide Chimani. “We feel like it’s our role to make sure we have answers,” said Rajan Patel, lead engineer for Google’s mobile search and app indexing team. “In mobile, oftentimes that’s in apps.”
For consumers, the move means cutting out the time and hassle it takes to download an app and install it on your phone. You can also use an app without having it take up space on the device. For Google, it could be a coup to try to make mobile apps less relevant and keep the search giant top of mind for smartphone users. While Google’s desktop search engine is still the most successful in the world, it isn’t as untouchable on smartphones.
Source: www.cnet.com
Download the all new Deccan Chronicle app for Android and iOS to stay up-to-date with latest headlines and news stories in politics, entertainment, sports, technology, business and much more from India and around the world.
