The largest social network of the world, Facebook and the search engine giant Google don’t exactly get along. After all, they are now rivals in the advertising world and are competing with each other to lure advertisers to their platforms. Therefore, it came as a major surprise when Google encountered support from its biggest rival in its effort to keep its search engine popular and relevant in a world that’s being increasingly dominated by mobile apps. On Friday, the social networking giant granted Google the ability of crawling and indexing Facebook mobile app, according to a spokeswoman of Google’s parent company’ Alphabet Inc.

As per the agreement, the result pages of searches conducted on Google will also display some content pertaining to Facebook’s app, which would include the profile information that’s open to the public. The spokeswoman asserted that these listings would be shown as ‘deep links’ and will guide users to the relevant area of the Facebook mobile app. This is largely similar to how content is indexed by Google from the public profiles on Facebook that are available on the web. Apart from that, the search engine giant can also access content from various other sources on the social network including Groups, Pages and Events.

Nevertheless, even after this deal, Google will not have permission to share the content that’s posted via private and logged-in sessions on the Facebook app. This means that the search engine is still locked out of most of the information that’s available within the tall walls of the social media network. In order to conduct these searches, users will have to take advantage of the Facebook search service, which was recently updated by the company. However, cooperation form the biggest social network in the world is an indication that Google is making progress in confronting and overcoming a huge challenge; the ability to search within apps.

While the search engine remains the most dominant one on the web, there is no denying that its computers don’t have the permission to crawl and index content that’s available within applications. This is a major downside because smartphone users spend the best part of their time on these mobile apps. Therefore, the company has to make an effort to convince mobile app developers to let it get a peek inside. According to experts, Google’s position in mobile search is at risk. Google is the go-to option when you need information and if it can’t deliver, then it is bad for its reputation.

Facebook’s agreement to let the search engine crawl inside its mobile app is an indication that the social network sees some benefits in the collaboration. This could refer to users who stay within the social network’s app after following a search result from Google. In an emailed statement, a spokeswoman for Facebook said that when public Facebook content is searched on the mobile web, users of Facebook for Android will now be able to go directly to the Facebook app once they find useful results in the search.

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