There was a time once when the early Internet was more or less made up of islands of information. If you wanted to get news, you'd type in the address of one of a few news websites you knew existed, and the same went for any other topic or sphere of knowledge you were interested in.

AOL was one of the first notable services that started bringing these islands together, and then search engines began crawling the web to try to index everything. Google, the name now synonymous with search, of course came out of that period as the biggest winner.

Whether you're aware or not, we currently live in a similar time, except on the mobile Internet. The islands of information are the apps we install on our smartphones, and until recently, they were disconnected in a similar way that early websites were: If you wanted to find table reservations, you'd use one app. If you wanted reviews for the restaurant, you'd use a different one.

Yet again, Google is finding a way to bring all of those islands together in an indexed, seamless way for mobile search.

Last week, Google introduced "App Streaming," which, along with Google's efforts to pull information from the world of apps into one searchable index, may once again revolutionize how people use the Internet. But this time it's creating a mobile-based, searchable, instantly accessible "web of apps" as Marketing Land put it.

App streaming works right in the results page for Google Search, and it promises to be a way for users to not only find information pulled from apps, but to access that information inside the context of the app itself, all without having to download a single megabyte from the Play Store.

"Today, you're more likely to be searching on your mobile device, and the best answers may be buried in an app... perhaps one that you don't even have installed yet," wrote Google engineering manager Jennifer Lin on Google's InsideSearch blog.

"Up until know, Google has only been able to show information from apps that have matching web content," she continued. Lin is referring to search results you might have encountered in a Google search that include suggestions to download the app -- for example, Wikipedia -- that mirrors its website's content.

"Because we recognize that there's a lot of great content that lives only in apps, starting today, we'll be able to show some 'app-first' content in Search as well," wrote Lin. "In addition, you're also going to start seeing an option to 'stream' some apps you don't have installed, right from Google Search, provided you're on good WiFi."

Google's app streaming feature is starting small. There are only nine apps in the first run of app streaming: Hotel Tonight, The Weather Channel, Chimani, Gormey, My Horoscope, Visual Anatomy Free, Useful Knots, Daily Horoscope, and New York Subway.

The trial right now is also limited to WiFi connections, as well as searches in the U.S. in English, and only on Android 5.0 Lollipop operating systems and up. It's not available for iOS at the moment, and you have to use the Google app (browser-based Google searches, even for Chrome, won't turn up the feature).

That said, App Streaming's future promises to be a boon for searchers, app publishers, and of course, Google itself.

The advantage for Google searchers is obvious: a whole new world of content and information -- as well as ways to interact with that content in a native way, without having to download anything -- all available at the command of the simple Google search.

Publishers, meanwhile, could benefit from the exposure their "streaming" app will get to new users -- as the experience is like a no-download preview of the app, which may entice a new segment of mobile users to download the app, if their experience is pleasant or useful. And for Google, it's a brand new segment of information to serve up in search, and undoubtedly a new world of advertising opportunities as well.

Google has been preparing the web of apps for two years, as part of its App Indexing project. The first results of the project can be seen in Android 6.0 Marshmallow's "Google Now on Tap," which provides contextual information from a wide selection of third-party apps in Google Now for the first time.

Google isn't the only one indexing information in apps, according to Marketing Land. Facebook has begun using Google App indexing for its app, while Apple has Deep Linking and Universal Links, the second of which Google supports. Microsoft has its own Bing App linking project as well.

But as of now, Google is the first to offer search users a truly in-app content experience, straight from the search results page and without any downloading.

Its first-run limited availability is only temporary, but its impact on how you use your mobile Internet may be big and quite far reaching.