Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is making a pretty big deal out of this. It wrote on its blog this morning that they “are obsessed with making your mobile search experience as fast as possible,” so, they updated their mobile homepage to load much faster. They did this by allowing google.com to cache in the browser, so that when you return a second time, it loads almost instantly. I tried it out on my Blackberry Curve, and sure enough, the second time I loaded the search page, it was much faster. And although, this is nice, it’s not the page loading that drives me nuts. It’s the actual search process that takes a long time, and that’s not getting any faster. Besides, I hardly ever go to Google.com in my browser since I have a standalone widget for it on my phone. Of possibly more consequence, Google also announced today a new iGoogle interface for mobile that provides you with an easier way to set up your mobile iGoogle page from a desktop computer. For instance, if weather and news are the most important items to you when you are on the go, you can drag and drop these gadgets to the top of your page. In addition, you can now read article summaries by clicking on “More” on any RSS feed.
What bothers me the most is that the results are so incredibly bad for mobile users. Even if you choose mobile search almost none of the the search results are adopted for mobile. Instead you get the normal web pages that are data heavy or not accessible (flash sites) on my mobile. What's the purpose of doing mobile optimised sites (XHTML, etc) when no one can find them?
I know that Google adopts pages for mobile but this doesn't seem to work very well and even when it does work you miss out on the mobile relevant content.
If you search for e.g. Absolut Vodka then one of the results should preferably be http://m.absolut.com or http://absolut.mobi
If anybody can make an optimized mobile search it will be Google. Sooner or later.
Google is most useful search engine for making popular to mobile.