Google's Mobile Search

Google’s Mobile Search

June 17th, 2005 by Eric

Google launched their Mobile Search (Beta) product. It is trying to build upon their existing portfolio of Mobile products — SMS search and Blogger Mobile. What I cannot understand is why this is just a big deal. Some of their features, allows the subscriber to now search XHTML pages and not just HTML pages. In my opinion, I don’t believe this to be a giant leap forward. But to give it a fair shake, I tried it out. The screenshots below illustrate two queries using the service from my mobile phone. The first attempt was: NBA

While I was skeptical 115,000 WAP sites about the NBA, I did notice that one of the first site that showed up was the WAP site for the NBA. However, this is a bit of slight of hand, in my opinion, since {WAP} is alphabetically *before* {WWW}. My second search was to look for the CNN WAP site.

While slightly more happy about only 10,400 links to surf through (10x less), I did not immediately find the CNN WAP site. In fact, all of the first 10 links were all *web* sites and *not* WAP sites. Finally, my last attempt was for the BBC WAP site. I figured those Brits are a bit ahead of us when using WAP, since they surf over 1.82B WAP links a month (Source: Mobile Data Assocation).

While I did get more hits, 134,000, the first link was the BBC WAP site. This was only a simple test, but does show that Google is making progress, albiet real slow. I don’t see how one would surf through all those links if you did not find it in the first 10 or 20. I’m still wary about using Google to search on my mobile phone, perhaps because surfing through all those results is a bit daunting. Also, I need an “All you can eat plan” before I attempt 10,000 or 100,000 links!