Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Mobile
  3. News

Google search results on mobile will soon look different from those on a desktop

Lulu Chang
By

google mobile search ridesharing
Nerify
Your Google search results are about to look different — that is, if you’re comparing mobile results to those on your desktop. As originally reported by Search Engine Land, Google will soon create a separate mobile index, “one that will be the main or ‘primary’ index that the search engine uses to respond to queries.” It will be distinct from the desktop index, which Search Engine Land says will “not be as up-to-date as the mobile index.”

The report is based upon a keynote address given by Gary Illyes, a webmaster trends analyst at Google, who spoke at Pubcon. While he didn’t outline any particular time frame for these changes to happen, he later confirmed to media that the new mobile index would arrive within “months.”

Recommended Videos

Google has long been making moves toward a mobile-first approach. Already, the web giant requires sites and online publishers to make their content mobile friendly in order to be properly indexed, and Google also recently debuted Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which allows for news articles found in Google’s search results to load faster on mobile devices.

Related

Still, little is known about how the new mobile index will work. How different will it really be from the desktop version? Will it contain exclusively mobile-optimized results? These remain mysteries that have yet to be solved.

Of course, given the rapid growth of mobile in the last several months, it comes as little surprise that tech giants across the board are fine-tuning their strategies. A report from comScore released in April noted that mobile represents 65 percent of digital media time, and the desktop is but a “secondary touch point” for a burgeoning number of digital users.

So get ready, friends. Your phone will soon become the source of all information — at least, if Google has its way.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Lulu Chang
Lulu Chang
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
T-Mobile lures subscribers with 500GB of Google One cloud storage for $5 a month
T-Mobile smartphone.

Starting October 12, T-Mobile and Sprint customers are eligible for a new and exclusive plan that will allow them to pay $5 a month for 500GB of Google One cloud storage.

The plan, announced Monday morning, allows for cloud backups of photos, videos, and contacts; extra storage for services such as Google Drive and Gmail; file storage and access from any compatible device; and the ability to share the extra storage with up to five additional people, who don't all necessarily have to be on the same T-Mobile account.

Read more
Will Google ever lose its throne as king of search? Here are its main contenders
Person using Google on a laptop.

“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results,” Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, argued in a research paper when they were still working out of their Stanford dorm rooms.

Today, Google is synonymous with the web -- but it’s also far from the sort of “competitive and transparent” search engine Brin and Page set out to develop decades ago. Google’s journey into the dictionary and becoming a trillion-dollar empire demanded a slate of fatal modifications to its original blueprint. The result is a search engine that buries organic links under an avalanche of ads, keeps tabs on its visitors’ every move and click, and manipulates results by tapping into the giant pool of data Google harvests from the rest of its services.

Read more
T-Mobile partners to promote Google apps for messaging, cloud storage, and TV
Google Pixel 5

T-Mobile is going all-in on Google apps and services. The two companies have announced a massive partnership that will see T-Mobile officially support Android Messages (with RCS, or Rich Communication Services) on all of its Android phones, and promote a range of Google's apps and services in place of its own.

A few different Google apps and services will get pushed by T-Mobile as part of the deal. For example, Google One will be pushed as T-Mobile's "preferred phone backup and cloud solution," and YouTube TV will be promoted as T-Mobile's premium live TV solution.

Read more