Mountain View, California — Google launched its “search options” feature earlier this year for desktop users, which included features such as: visited pages, not yet visited, books, blogs, news and much more. But in today’s bustling world of smartphone apps, the search giant is not limiting these admirable features to desktop only. Google on Thursday rolled out a new feature for users in the United States on Android, iPhone, Palm WebOS and other mobile handsets called “Search Options.”
Google endlessly keep revamping its mobile browser edition so that people with basic handhelds can enjoy the same search experience that you would find on a smartphone.
While unveiling the product on the official Google Mobile Blog, the search giant is now extending some of those options to users with the iPhone, Android phones, or Palm WebOS-based devices. Filter your original search by forums or reviews, and then further refine that search by time period — the past 24 hours, the past week, the past year, or a specific date range.
“For example, suppose you are shopping at a store for a camera, and you would like to see what users have been saying about a specific model within the past week. You can do this simply by searching for the name of the product. Then, on the search results page, use [Options] to filter by [Forums] and refine further by choosing [Past week],” Reza Ziaei, a software engineer on Google’s mobile team, wrote in a blog post.
Image Courtesy of Google
Users can test the feature by searching on google.com and selecting the options drop-down menu.
The latest development in mobile search is the filtering option that offers specified search results. This feature almost seems like it was made specifically for groovy tech shoppers.
Users of handsets that do not 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 have got to be one of the larger user bases out there for mobile searches…”
As Google’s enhancements takes the desktop experience into the palm of your hand, so it would not be surprising to see Google expand the feature even if you own a basic cell phone in the near future.
Nevertheless, Google is pretty smart at exploring new ideas and 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.