philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

What Google Just Announced Is a Bombshell

What Google just announced at its I/O developer conference is a bombshell for the future of the company. For years the search giant has witnessed the chipping away of its core product — search — due to the rise of mobile applications and their siloed-off experiences. Users are engaging more and more with programs that have no attachment and often no requirement for search on the broad web, and as a result Google's position as the owner of our habits, interests, and needs across the internet has looked increasingly at risk.

The company demoed a new feature within its Android OS which allows the Now service (a dashboard of notifications focused on your life and interests) to plug in as a layer that essentially hovers above any app running on your phone or tablet. Activated by the home button, it's always there. This means that you can get contextual search information around almost anything you're doing, provided there is text and data that Google can pull from the app itself. And the best part is that developers won't have to make any changes to their existing software to allow the new service — dubbed Now on Tap — to bring search and context into the user's view.

This is a major move for two reasons. The first is that it really brings Google back to a place of dominance as the glue that holds your digital life together. 

But secondly, it starts to show how Google can be an interconnecting layer between the apps themselves — a kind of neutral staging ground between one action and another. 

See the full story here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-28/what-google-just-announced-is-a-bombshell