Chris Yerga, engineering director of Google GOOGL +0.60%, introduces some features of Google Play during Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, in San Francisco on June 27, 2012.

Anyone wondering how serious Google is about tackling its mobile challenges should take a look at Internet domains.
Google paid $25 million to control the “.app” top-level domain this week, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a non-profit group which maintains much of the technical plumbing of the Internet.
The price is more than three times as much as the previous record for a new top-level domain, the $6.8 million paid by Dot Tech LLC in September for the “.tech” top-level domain. Google rival Amazon.com AMZN -1.21% paid $4.6 million for the “.buy” domain name in September and $2.2 million for “.spot” in October.
Winning the auction gives Google control over Internet addresses ending in .app. It can allow others to register names, likely by selling those rights, or keep all .app addresses for its own use. Google has not disclosed its plans, and a Google spokesman declined to comment.
Google has purchased other domains in recent years and made specific addresses available for others to buy. Google controls “.minna,” based on the Japanese word for everyone, for Japanese-oriented businesses; “.soy” for companies and publishers that want to reach Hispanics online; “.how,” for do-it-yourselfers; and “.foo” for software developers.
“We’ve been excited and curious about the potential for new TLDs for .soy long,” a Google spokeswoman wrote in an email statement. “We are very .app-y with .how, at a .minna-mum, they have the potential to .foo-ward Internet innovation.”
Unlike that joking statement, growing mobile usage is a serious threat to Google, which grew to dominate Internet search and advertising on personal computers.
Google search ads on smaller mobile devices sell for lower prices because people are less likely to buy something on their phones after they click on an ad. The rise of apps also means people don’t search as much on their phones, or they search using specific apps such as Amazon.
Google is trying to tackle these problems with a focus is on mobile apps and its Play app store. The company said Thursday that it will start running ads in the Play store, allowing developers to pay to promote their apps. Sales of apps are already Google’s largest non-advertising business — it paid more than $7 billion to developers in the past year, implying Play store sales of more than $10 billion.
Google also said this week that its search results will include links to pages and information from inside mobile apps, through a technology known as deep-linking.
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