• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, May 28, 2015

Deep-linking will eventually allow people to search across every connected device -- not just across the Web. More than finding information within an app on a smartphone, the technology will turn the link structure into a local area network, making it possible to search and discover content across any linked device. It also will enable marketers to use the data for ad targeting. Think peer-to-peer network. Here's how.

URX is not focused on that today, but the platform the company engineers have built will enable it in the future. It will connect the devices and the data what people refer to today as the Internet of Things and enabling marketers to integrate that data into services like Google remarketing lists for search advertising (RLSA).

CEO John Milinovich, a former Google employee on the Google Analytics team, co-founded URX, a startup from February 2013. The company funded by Google Ventures, among others, continues to build a knowledge graph for mobile apps that crawls, indexes, structures, and searches against content inside apps.

Milinovich believes the business model brings interoperability across mobile apps and other devices, and eventually will allow marketers to use the data for a variety of actions such as remarketing and retargeting advertisements.

Perhaps technologists will finally make the mythical smart refrigerator that can tell you when you're out of milk a reality through deep linking, rather than radio frequency identification technology (RFID), as the electronics industry tried to do since 2002. "We want the connected refrigerator to broadcast the intent that you are out of milk," Milinovich said.

Automatic identification from programmatic bidding and ad serving to connecting one piece of content or device to another will become the fastest-growing media area in the next five years. Links are prevalent across the Web, growing in mobile content. URX, along with Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, wants that same link structure to prevail in apps. The move will "fix" the discovery process that mobile lacks by letting users to find information inside them, not just assume what's in them by their name. They will do it through markup languages like Schema.org.

The three most important features changing the face of search, according to Milinovich:

1)     Search becomes a series of user interfaces. The world will see multiple ways to search and display information.

2)     Search and contextual signals on mobile or connect devices will provide a plethora of information such as apps on the phone and location to serve and target content.

3)     Relevancy on mobile becomes completely different than anything found on the Web from desktops, which will likely remain the source for long-tail research. 

Supporting deep links requires developers to setup deep linking in the app, let other developers discover and understand the apps' deep linking schemas, and use deep linking throughout all marketing and advertising channels such as email, search, display, video and other media. It means sending a consumer from an advertisement to a page in a mobile app.

Join us at the MediaPost Search Insider Summit where we will debate and discuss the possibilities such as how to use data from garnered through deep links to remarket and retarget in a variety of platforms like Google RLSA.