It was back in September when Google first announced they were planning to bring Google Instant to mobile devices and have this week launched the beta version, available to US iPhone and Android users (running Android 2.2 or Apple iOS 4.0).
The mobile version of Google Instant works just like the desktop version, when you enter a search, you’ll see predictions of what Google thinks you might be searching for. As we demonstrated in one of our previous posts, predicted results are not always relevant.
Google recently said 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.”
This should come as welcome news to mobile ‘Googlers’ everywhere as it should essentially save valuable time when searching ‘on the go’ – providing of course, you’re picking up a healthy 3G or WIFI signal.
What will remain to be seen (we haven’t seen it in action) is whether you will actually see any results changing as the keyboard is likely to be covering the results – it may just be a total waste of time!
The amount of people searching on mobile devices is growing fast – research by RBC analyst Ross Sandler, estimates that mobile search will equate to 20 percent of total search queries by 2012.
Sadler also estimates that the number of people using smartphones will increase to 766 million by 2012. with this, the number of searches on smartphones will grow from 157 billion to 586 billion.
All considered, mobile search will grow to make up a big percentage of the search total. How much these searches are worth is yet to be seen.
