Google has made its new mobile search service available to the public after a few customers spent some weeks trialling it. The new service can be checked out here. This blog post lists some of the new features:
–Build a homepage: Effectively you create a Google mobile homepage and decide what news and information to populate it with, such as weather, stock quotes, movies, news sources and so on. They can be reordered, replaced and remodified. The news sources include BBC News, CNN, E!, ESPN, MSNBC, Time, Newsweek, NYTimes, Rolling Stone, Slashdot and Techbargains.
–Fewer clicks to answer: Google has worked to reduce the number of clicks you need to get to the answer you want. There’s not too many details of how this is done, but there is one example given. When you enter your location the homepage remembers it and returns results based on that — if you enter more than one location you can choose the one you want from a drop-down menu. This is a good idea because it prevents people having to enter the location for every search. However, when I tried to search for movies close to “Santa Monica LA” the service automatically corrected it to “Santa Monica Ln”, apparently in Carbondale, Illinois. “Santa Monica California” got the desired location, and of course it was stored so the issue wouldn’t come up again.
–Results based on search type: Straight from the blog: “We’re continually refining our algorithm-based search to intelligently produce the results you want. You won’t need to sift through both mobile and regular web results, or specify your search type–local, image, web, etc.–as our new search experience will offer you results based on the nature of the query itself.”
This comes at the same time as Yahoo expands its oneSearch service to make it easier for publishers to submit pages. I hate to use cliches, but the mobile search battle is heating up…
Related stories:
–LG And Google Team Up To Market Handsets With Google Software
–Yahoo Expands OneSearch To WAP
–Mobile Search Roundup: Google; Medio; MSN; JumpTap
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