Google released a new mobile search engine additional to their existing mobile search.
While Google’s old mobile search engine lets you pick from different types of engines (web, images, local and so on), the new search engine combine these types of results all into one page for your specific queries. Search for photos of cat stevens, and you’ll get:
- 3 pics on top of the page, along with a link to “more images”
- 6 web results with extra-short snippets and the URL showing (along with another link for more results)
- a “search nearby” input box for Google Local/ Maps results
- a link to more results from Google News
(When you follow links to e.g. web pages, Google will act as a mobile proxy, republishing the full content of the page on their server, which raises interesting “copyright 1.0” issues.)Getting rid of forcing users to make a pre-selection of a search type makes sense, I think. (Ask’s mobile search went the exact opposite and got rid of the search box instead, offering only the choice of search type – a bad interface decision in my opinion.) It makes some sense for normal desktop search too, and indeed, Google is more and more integrating different result types onto their normal web result pages.
[Thanks Nadir G.!]
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