Google News: Search at I/O 16 Recap: Eight things you don’t want to miss
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 go to Google billions of times per day to fulfill their daily information needs. They’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, they want to make it easy for publishers to integrate and grow with Google.
In case you didn’t have a chance to attend their sessions, we put together a recap of all the Search happenings at I/O.
1: Introducing rich cards
They 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 they’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
They want to make it easy for webmasters and developers to track and measure their performance in search results. Google 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 their 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 they’re excited to launch a pilot later this summer.
3: Getting up to speed with Accelerated Mobile Pages
Google provided an update on their 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. They announced that they’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 their 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
They 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)
They 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
Google also revamped their developer documentation, organizing our docs around topical guides to make it easier to follow.
If you need any further updates on Google’s I/O 16 Recap, contact an Onimod Global specialist today.
