At Google, it’s all about speed. That’s doubly true for mobile applications. Google made some improvements to its mobile search, making it load faster on most mobile browsers. It does this by caching the page.
Google also added an iGoogle link to its mobile homepage. It also now allows you to customize and rearrange the widgets on the mobile version of your iGoogle start page so what you see on your mobile iGoogle can be different than what you see on your desktop. (You have to set this up from a regular computer, but can basically drag and drop widgets around to your liking).
This should make iGoogle a much more viable mobile start page. And, arguably, you need a start page with shortcuts to your favorite content on your mobile browser more than you do on your desktop. It’s just faster that way.
Below is a longish Google video with a demo of the new functionality (skip to about 1:44 in, when the actual demo starts:
Wow really caching the page, wow amazing new technology… news worthy!
You can tell mobile is taking off when….
The real game changer for mobile web browsing for me was the introduction of the iPhone with it’s intuitive (as in actually usable) and fast web browser. Now that services like Google start to adapt to the special needs for mobile I can see for the first time that this becomes more then a gimmick that the kids show of on the school yard.
The guys who could become the start page of mobile phones are these guys:
http://quick.as/
You don’t *have* to setup your settings from your desktop…they created the desktop option because doing it via the Settings link on your mobile device can be a pain and require a bunch of clicks.
Wow really caching the page,
It might seem like a pretty minor speed improvement, but when you consider that it might save millions of people a few seconds a day, that’s remarkable. Especially when you consider the impact on the environment of all that data that need not be resent over the cellular network.
Caching pages is fine and really helps, but you still have to *type* the search term.
A couple of colleagues and I built an iPhone voice search demo last weekend that I have been showing at WWDC. This simply records the search request, sends it to our server for speech recognition, scrapes google and uploads the results back to the phone. *much* faster and more convenient than typing. We support completely open search requests. Check it out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npRtTdGeWQA
There is certainly many upcoming business models linked to local search & listings. Google is optimizing and getting ready for the *New Internet* mobile war.
@Gunnar: yes… this is definitely the future…
Gunnar, been there and done that:
http://seo.seocompany.ca/yahoo-voice-search/
It’s a nice way of searching, especially, I imagine, on devices without keyboards.
the limited keypad/keyboard interaction on relatively tiny devices compared to say laptops will always just be a faster route to carpel tunnel…however I do find Gmail and Google Docs convenient to use on the move to keep up to date
Yeah great, they now cache the results; but was speed really the issue? I love what they did with teh gmail downloadable app. Why not look at making one of those for search?