Search at I/O 16 Recap: Eight things you don’t want to miss

Thursday, June 02, 2016

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 and AMP
sandbox.

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.

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.

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.

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 o
during our
office hours, hosted weekly via
hangouts-on-air.

Posted by Fabian Schlup, Software Engineer