Google Instant - Practically made for mobile

Google Instant is useful on the desktop, but I often just search from my address bar instead of going to Google.com. Useful is probably a pretty big understatement, but a decent broadband connection yields snappy searches on Google regardless. Fire up Instant Search on a mobile browser, though, and you have something so fast that it’s, err, Instant.


I don’t mean to be flip. Instant on a mobile browser speeds up search so drastically, especially on mediocre connections where search results can be painful to load, that you may never go back to searching from an app, widget, or your mobile browser address bar. With one sad little bar of 3G, I was actually startled when my browser screen filled with search results that updated themselves as I typed a query. Here’s a video from Google’s blog post Thursday about mobile Instant Search:

If anyone were to ask me (and, unfortunately, they haven’t), I’d tell Google that this is the sort of technology on which they should be focusing, rather than legal debacles over Street View. This is why people go to Google, no matter which device they might be using: fast, convenient, accurate, predictive search.

As Google noted in their post about mobile Instant,

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.

Unfortunately, this enhanced search is only available on devices running Apple’s iOS 4.0 and above and Android 2.2 in the United States. Everyone else is out of luck for now. Like most things Google, it’s only in beta, but google.com is now the homepage on my mobile browser. I even set Skyfire’s user agent to Android instead of Desktop where it’s been since I downloaded the browser, so that google.com would surface the link to turn on Instant.

Now if Google could just put Buzz, Wave, and Street View behind them and do more great things like this, they’d have a lot fewer legal hassles and a lot more enthusiastic (rather than default, since Google simply is search to most people) users.

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Chris Dawson is a freelance writer and consultant with years of experience in educational technology and web-based systems.

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Christopher Dawson
Christopher Dawson is a freelance writer and educational technology consultant. He has worked for his local school district as a teacher and technology director, for the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health and for Biogen, Inc. (now Biogen-IDEC, Inc.). He has also consulted with STATNet and Cytyc Corporation. Currently, his only business relationships of interest are with X2 Development Corporation (the supplier of the student information system he administers), Hewlett Packard (the primary vendor for computer hardware in the school district he supports), and Intel (reference designer for the Classmate PCs he has implemented in his local schools). He may report on any of these companies as his experiences with them have direct bearing on educational technology; positive reports are not necessarily an endorsement and he receives no direct financial compensation from these companies or any others. Intel paid all expenses for his attendance at the 2009 Intel Classmate PC Ecosystem Summit which he attended as the sole representative of the technology press. He was invited to attend in 2010 but his wife would have killed him if he spent 3 days in Vegas geeking out and left her home alone with a new baby. Acer provided him with a 50% discount on an Aspire One netbook in early 2009 after he tested it for 30 days through their educational seed program. He liked the netbook at the time but it has since broken and sits unused in his office. Canonical sent him Ubuntu lanyards, t-shirts, and mousepads for his kids. He stole one of the lanyards and proudly hangs his keys from it and occasionally features his 7-year old wearing an oversized Ubuntu t-shirt on his Facebook profile. Gunnar Optiks sent him a pair of computer glasses to evaluate for a holiday gift guide. He is wearing them now as he types this because they never asked for them back and they rock out loud. Seriously - they work brilliantly and make it much easier to spend 20 hours a day staring at an LCD. Microsoft gave him a free copy of Office 2010 professional, a desktop clock, and a useless book on Office 2010 when he attended the launch of Office/Sharepoint 2010. He occasionally uses the SharePoint lanyard they gave him instead of the Ubuntu lanyard for his keys, but feels dirty afterwards. Any other companies wishing to send him cool things to evaluate, wear, or otherwise adorn his kids are more than welcome to; he promises to disclose it here if he keeps any of the stuff.
Biography
Christopher Dawson
Christopher Dawson grew up in Seattle, back in the days of pre-antitrust Microsoft, coffeeshops owned by something other than Starbucks, and really loud, inarticulate music. He escaped to the right coast in the early 90's and received a degree in Information Systems from Johns Hopkins University. While there, he began a career in health and educational information systems, with a focus on clinical trials and related statistical programming and database modeling. This focus led him to several positions at Johns Hopkins, then to a large biotech company in Cambridge, and finally, to his own consulting business. Now, he lives with his wife, five kids, a dog, and too many chickens in a small town in north-central Massachusetts where he spent several years teaching and managing technology in his local school district. Now he is a consultant and freelance writer in the areas of educational technology and web-based information systems. He writes a fair amount about his chickens, too.
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If anyone were to ask me (and, unfortunately, they haven’t), I’d tell Google that this is the sort of technology on which they should be focusing, rather than legal debacles over Street View. This is why people go to Google, no matter which device they might be using: fast, convenient, accurate, predictive search.

As Google noted in their post about mobile Instant,

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.

Unfortunately, this enhanced search is only available on devices running Apple’s iOS 4.0 and above and Android 2.2 in the United States. Everyone else is out of luck for now. Like most things Google, it’s only in beta, but google.com is now the homepage on my mobile browser. I even set Skyfire’s user agent to Android instead of Desktop where it’s been since I downloaded the browser, so that google.com would surface the link to turn on Instant.

Now if Google could just put Buzz, Wave, and Street View behind them and do more great things like this, they’d have a lot fewer legal hassles and a lot more enthusiastic (rather than default, since Google simply is search to most people) users.