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The official Google Search blog
New in the Google app: more Now cards from your Android apps
April 28, 2015
Our phones help us find answers to questions large and small, stay on top of what’s happening in our day and in the world, and get things done quickly. The Google app can help you do all that, faster, and in one place. And Now cards in the app proactively bring you information at the right time without you even having to ask.
Earlier this year, we started showing
Now cards from some of your favorite apps
on Android devices. Now, we're working with
70 new partners
to bring you
even more Now cards
from the apps you have on your phone.
For example, if you book a Zipcar out for a day hike, you can keep track of your return time and get directions to the drop-off location with Now cards – checking them is as easy as a simple tap on the Google app.
Or need a good a playlist on a Friday night? Now cards can recommend playlists and stations from Spotify, TuneIn or YouTube based on your preferences.
Here are a few other ways Now cards from your apps can help you out:
Get breaking news about the aftermath of the Nepal earthquake from ABC News, Circa, or feedly
Know when your pad thai is about to arrive with reminders from Eat24 that the food you ordered will soon be on your doorstep, or get inspired with the recipe of the day from Allrecipes
Keep your fitness goals front and center with gentle nudges from Runkeeper, Jawbone, or Adidas
And if you’re out to dinner, simply tap on a Now card to pay your bill with OpenTable
Make sure to update to the latest version of the
Google app
and your other favorite apps that work with this feature – then look out for helpful Now cards from those apps on Android over the next few weeks. Stay tuned as we add more apps and functionality in the future!
Posted by Aparna Chennapragada, Director of Product Management
Ranking change to help you find mobile-friendly sites rolling out today
April 21, 2015
We’ve all been there: you’re on your phone and click through to a website, only to find it’s hard to read or burdensome to navigate because it isn’t formatted for a mobile screen. With mobile phones increasingly becoming the primary way for people to search the Internet, we want to ensure that when you search on Google you find content that is not just relevant and timely, but also easy to read and interact with on smaller mobile screens.
A lack of mobile friendliness is also a problem for web publishers: visitors abandon websites that aren’t mobile friendly at higher rates. And
research shows
74% of users say they are more likely to return to a mobile-friendly site.
That’s why we’ve been encouraging webmasters to create sites that avoid the pitfalls of small text and hard to navigate formatting in order to provide a great experience for mobile visitors to their pages. Back in November, we introduced a “
mobile-friendly badge
” to notify users when a link in search results led to a mobile friendly-page, and
provided resources
to help webmasters become mobile-friendly. And today we’re starting to roll out a change that
we announced
two months ago to take into account whether a site is mobile-friendly when we rank search results on mobile phones.
Note that this is just one of over 200 signals we use to evaluate the best results. Non-mobile-friendly sites won’t disappear from mobile Search results—they may still rank high if they hold great content the user wants.
If you use Google search on your mobile phone, you can now more easily find high-quality and relevant results where text is readable without tapping or zooming, tap targets are spaced appropriately, and the page avoids unplayable content or horizontal scrolling. In just the two months since we announced this change, we’ve seen a 4.7 percentage point uptick in the proportion of sites that are mobile friendly, and we hope to see even more in the coming months.
Our mobile ranking will now use mobile-friendliness as a signal that weighs in favor of pages that are formatted for mobile phones, like the image on the right.
The good news is that it doesn't have to be expensive or time-consuming: it could be as simple as adjusting website settings or picking out a design you like. Even if you opt to fully redesign your site, a small business website with 10-20 pages could be completed in a day or so.
Webmasters can check if their site is mobile-friendly by examining individual pages with the
Mobile-Friendly Test
or checking the status of the entire site through the
Mobile Usability report in Webmaster Tools
. Once a site
becomes mobile-friendly
, we will automatically re-process those pages (and webmasters can expedite the process by using
Fetch as Google with Submit to Index
).
Posted by Cody Kwok, Principal Software Engineer
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