Google’s No. 1 strength is its search product, so it makes sense that all of their products feed back into it somehow. Today, the company announced the introduction of “App Activities” into Search. What this means is that when you search for something like “Fandango,” which uses Google+ sign-in, you’ll see top movies based on what users are rating.
Today at Disrupt NY, Seth Sternberg, Director of Product Management for Google+, and Ardan Arac, Product Manager at Google, are demoing the new feature.
The plan is to surface interesting in-app content, using search to dig deeper into what people are doing on those apps. The launch apps are music and movie ones, which lend themselves to lists of top content based on listens and ratings. Google is rolling this out in the next few weeks for Fandango, SoundCloud, Deezer, Flixster, Slacker Radio, Songza and TuneIn. Up until now, app activity was only showing on profile pages:
Of course, this all relies on users authenticating with Google+, something the company has been trying to get developers interested in leveraging since it was announced in February. This will work for iOS, Android and web apps.
Here’s a look at what Fandango search results will look like with app activities being surfaced:
A closer look shows the aggregated data based on listens within the app by its users:
This particular feature is an incentive for app developers to make sure they’re building for Android and to include the Google+ sign-in component, since all of the data that’s being pulled out makes an app more attractive to users who are looking for new ones to download. When you visit Apple’s App Store, you’re greeted with simple ratings, reviews and screenshots, but no interesting data that shows how active they are.
You could imagine that information like top scores could be displayed for games in the future, making the whole experience of using the app more social and interactive.