Cross-posted from the Google Developers Blog
Two weeks ago, over 7,000 developers descended upon Mountain View for this
year’s Google I/O, with a takeaway that it’s truly an exciting time for Search. People come to
Google billions of times per day to fulfill their daily information needs.
We’re focused on creating features and tools that we believe will help users
and publishers make the most of Search in today’s world. As Google continues to
evolve and expand to new interfaces, such as the Google assistant and Google
Home, we want to make it easy for publishers to integrate and grow with Google.
In case you didn’t have a chance to attend all our sessions, we put together a
recap of all the Search happenings at I/O.
1: Introducing rich cards
We announced rich cards, a new Search result format building on rich snippets, that uses schema.org
markup to display content in an even more engaging and visual format. Rich
cards are available in English for recipes and movies and we’re excited to roll
out for more content categories soon. To learn more, browse the new gallery with screenshots and code samples of each markup type or watch our rich cards devByte.
2: New Search Console reports
We want to make it easy for webmasters and developers to track and measure
their performance in search results. We launched a new report in Search Console to help developers confirm that their rich card markup is valid. In the report
we highlight “enhanceable cards,” which are cards that can benefit from marking up more fields. The new Search Appearance filter also makes it easy for webmasters to filter their traffic by AMP and rich
cards.
3: Real-time indexing
Users are searching for more than recipes and movies: they’re often coming to
Search to find fresh information about what’s happening right now. This insight
kickstarted our efforts to use real-time indexing to connect users searching
for real-time events with fresh content. Instead of waiting for content to be
crawled and indexed, publishers will be able to use the Google Indexing API to
trigger the indexing of their content in real time. It’s still in its early
days, but we’re excited to launch a pilot later this summer.
3: Getting up to speed with Accelerated Mobile Pages
We provided an update on our use of AMP, an open source effort to speed up the mobile web. Google Search uses AMP to
enable instant-loading content. Speed is important---over 40% of users abandon
a page that takes more than three seconds to load. We announced that we’re
bringing AMPed news carousels to the iOS and Android Google apps, as well as
experimenting with combining AMP and rich cards. Stay tuned for more via our blog and github page.
In addition to the sessions, attendees could talk directly with Googlers at the
Search & AMP sandbox.
5: A new and improved Structured Data Testing Tool
We updated the popular Structured Data Testing tool. The tool is now tightly integrated with the DevSite Search Gallery and the
new Search Preview service, which lets you preview how your rich cards will look on the search results page.
6: App Indexing got a new home (and new features)
We announced App Indexing’s migration to Firebase, Google’s unified developer platform. Watch the session to learn how to grow your app with Firebase App Indexing.
7: App streaming
App streaming is a new way for Android users to try out games without having to
download and install the app -- and it’s already available in Google Search.
Check out the session to learn more.
8. Revamped documentation
We also revamped our developer documentation, organizing our docs around topical guides to make it easier to follow.
Thanks to all who came to I/O -- it’s always great to talk directly with
developers and hear about experiences first-hand. And whether you came in
person or tuned in from afar, let’s continue the conversation on the webmaster forum or during our office hours, hosted weekly via hangouts-on-air.
Posted by Posted by Fabian Schlup, Software Engineer