As you know, Google Instant is basically what happens now when you’re on Google.com and you search – poof! It’s there. You type in what you want and there’s no need to press the search button. One small step for my day, one giant leap for me if you could all the clicks I’m saving over my whole lifetime. This functionality was announced for mobile devices in September, and now there’s a Beta release.
This Beta release is available for most iPhone and Android devices in the US. Try it out now, if you dare, by going to http://google.com/ in your mobile phone’s web browser and clicking the “Turn on” link below the search box (if it does not appear, try hitting the refresh button and checking again.) Take a peek at the video of this working on the phone here, then take a look at the press release below!
The power of Google Instant, now in your pocket
11/04/2010 01:01:00 PM
Google Instant makes search faster by displaying not just predictions but actual search results as you type. This saves valuable time on a desktop browser, but wouldn’t it be great to have Google Instant on mobile devices, where each keystroke and page load is much slower and you frequently have just a moment to find the information you need?
In September we announced that we were working to bring Google Instant to mobile, and today we’re making a beta version available to most iPhone and Android devices in the U.S. To try it out, go to google.com in your phone’s browser and tap the Google Instant “Turn on” link beneath the search box (if you don’t see the “Turn on” link, try waiting a moment and then refresh the page).
Like the desktop version of Google Instant, when you type on your mobile device you’ll see predictions of what you might be searching for. If you type [anse], for example, you should see [ansel adams] along with other predictions. Results for the first prediction appear automatically, and tapping on the other predictions will display those results. Pressing the enter key or the search button skips the predictions and will display results for exactly what you’ve typed. Check out our demo video:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-_HxR5QFn8&feature=player_embedded]
With Google Instant on mobile, we’re pushing the limits of mobile browsers and wireless networks. You will probably notice a big improvement in speed when you search thanks to a new AJAX and HTML5 implementation for mobile that dynamically updates the page with new results and eliminates the need to load a new page for each query.
Google Instant for mobile works best on 3G and WiFi networks, but since the quality of any wireless connection can fluctuate, we’ve made it easy to enable or disable Google Instant without ever leaving the page. Just tap the “Turn on” or “Turn off” link.
We hope you’ll enjoy using Google Instant for mobile as much as we enjoyed making it. It’s currently available for Android 2.2 (“Froyo”) devices and iPhones and iPods running iOS 4 in the U.S. in English. We’re working to support additional countries and languages and more devices in the coming months, so stay tuned.
Posted by Steve Kanefsky, Software Engineer
[Via SlashGear]
