A few days after unveiling its Plus Box search results, Google announces a new mobile search engine that is more tailored to a user’s needs. In a nutshell, the new Google mobile search experience is all about:
- Getting relevant and specific information, right in the user’s mobile homepage – this includes direct link to movie updates, stock updates, feeds and other mobile gadget. These gadgets or links can be rearranged to suit the user’s preference,
- Getting answer/search results with the fewest click on the mobile phone’s keypad as possible – the mobile search engine remembers previous locations that a user visited. Users will no longer have to retype lengthy URLs over and over again,
- Getting the results that best fits what the user needs – direct and specific search results are displayed using an improved search algorithm that delivers intelligent search result.
Revolutionary? Not really, just some minor improvements on the aging mobile search technology that Google has been using since 2001. Ironically, this announcement came almost the same time as Yahoo’s announcement on its new Mobile Publisher Service, which is geared more on enticing mobile publishers and content generators to enter their fold, and Microsoft’s mobile zooming technology via Zenzui. But then, Google has been known to work on the concept of simplicity when it comes to its search portal. Google’s new mobile search technology maybe lacking on the GUI department but it is definitely heavy on the technical side. And at the end of the day, the battle for search engine supremacy all boils down to how effective the search algorithm will be to answer the user’s information needs.
