As you may recall, Google launched its “search options” feature earlier this year. This is a set of filtering options users can engage for their search results. They include things like blogs, books, images, video, forum results, timeframe, etc.
Google has now launched search options for mobile in the United States on Android, iPhone, and Palm WebOS devices.
Search options look slightly different on mobile devices. They appear on the right side of the screen as opposed to the left side. The link to bring up the search options menu appears on the right (on search result pages) as well.
If you haven’t been keeping these search options in mind for SEO in the past, you may want to start considering it now. Being on mobile, means that people may be using them more often as they look for specific information quickly. It can be more of a pain to scroll through results on a phone, and options may provide just the right filters to eliminate the need to scroll much.
Users of devices that don’t support Google’s mobile search options are already complaining. For example, one person commenting on Google’s announcement says, “I’m really sad to see so many of these new Google mobile services being rolled out for Android, iPhone, and Palm, but not for Windows Mobile. I hope you guys will keep developing for us WinMo users too!”
Another says, “Give BlackBerry users some love please! We’ve got to be one of the larger user bases out there for mobile searches…”
It would not be surprising to see Google expand the feature to more devices in the near future. The company is generally pretty good about trying to make its products available to more users when possible. Just about every day it seems that they are announcing the expansion of some product to more devices or to more languages.
