In-app Content Indexing - Long Way To Go?

Can’t believe this has taken till 2013 November to happen (writing this note a month after it happened):

https://developers.google.com/app-indexing/

A year ago I was thinking of building a deep search for apps (knowing there would one day be a standard for crawling and indexing apps). I was debating with friends if companies would be open to offering their in-app data in a structured format, for indexing by a third party search tool, in exchange for more traffic/downloads sent their way.

I guess the answer is yes in general. Apps want to be found. The only concern being opening up data for indexing (through a standard mechanism) also means a whole host of competitors crawl your data on the pretext of also being a search engine. Happened on the web, will happen on mobile once a standard evolves. So far, mobile only apps haven’t had to worry about bots crawling and stealing their content.

Google’s initiative is a starting point in this direction. I think it caters more to the big guys who are on web AND mobile, and would rather take the user to the app experience from the search results. Not sure it is yet meant to help discovery of mobile-only apps.

Opportunity?