Microsoft Bing Is Building Up A Massive Index Of Apps And App Actions

Finding apps with the content you are looking for and the ability to fulfill the task you are trying to accomplish is often a process of trial and error. It requires trying individual apps and if there are multiple apps that do the same thing, it’s hard to know which app to use in the first place unless it’s one of the apps you use every day. Microsoft is trying to solve this problem with the help of app developers. Bing is expanding its Actions Intelligence to Bing and Bing-powered search (including Cortana) and building up a massive index of apps and app actions.

To power this more efficient use model, Bing is expanding its Actions Intelligence to Bing and Bing-powered search (including Cortana) and building up a massive index of apps and app actions. And we are making it easy for you to participate in this new model, as you can use standardized markup on your website to help establish the link between your content and your app, as well as between your content entities and the actions your apps can perform on them.

To do this, Bing is leveraging two open standards and we want you to get ready to use them early on:

1. App Links and its simple markup to allow users to open your content with your apps straight from our web results and experience it in the immersive device experience instead of in the browser, and
2. Schema.org and its action vocabulary to help users discover your app by the actions that your app can perform on the content they are searching for

Read more about it here.