Google is good at unleashing products quickly when it wants to, and it has certainly tried to focus more and more on a global market, but even with those precedents their recent announcement is impressive. In a display of surprising speed, Google has created versions of Instant Mobile for all twenty-eight languages spoken in countries where Google Mobile is available.
In their December 9th announcement on the Google Mobile Blog, the company declared that they’d finished unrolling this new product globally. While it was expected that global availability was on its way, no one expected that the search engine giant would fulfill its promise so soon after the initial product version was released. The original Google statement read “We’re working to support additional countries and languages and more devices in the coming months” — phrasing that didn’t indicate full support in just over one month.
The Google Instant Mobile update was initially released on November 4th, allowing English language users to access the instant search features released for the web earlier this year from their mobile devices. The thirty-five day globalization of the product added twenty-seven languages, and access from more than thirty new countries.
The roll-out also includes the AJAX and HTML5 features designed to speed up the searches themselves — which is especially important for the dynamically displayed results. As with the English-language version, the updates allow users to get dynamic search results more quickly than they previously completed static search queries, and those who simply prefer static search results can turn the feature off with a single click.
The update is automatically integrated into Google search features that are accessed via any Android web browser, and is available for Android OS version 2.2 and up. It has also been released for the iOS4 (Apple’s latest iPhone operating system).
