Google Search optimized for a mess of phones

(Credit: Google)

Last December we showed you how Google refined its search results for iPhone and Android. The change loaded pages faster and fit the results to the screen width for searches generated from Google.com (plus for the specialized Google widget on Android and the search box on Safari.)

On Wednesday, Google began supporting these optimized results for feature phones--essentially handsets that are not smartphones or PDAs--in 38 languages and in more than 60 countries. The project to revamp search results builds on a March 2009 initiative that included iPhone and Android phones in about 20 countries. After that, it expanded to feature phones in the U.S. and Japan.

The optimized result is a listings page very similar to what you would see on your desktop, that is populated with image, blog, video, news, and product entries that are relevant to your search, often as the first result. An image showing the local weather forecast is one common example; a thumbnail of a Google map or movie showtimes are two others.

The language support includes English (U.S. and U.K.), Spanish, Japanese, Polish, French, Dutch, Korean, Turkish, Italian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Thai, German, Russian, Tagalog, Swedish, Vietnamese, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Finnish, Indonesian, Croatian, Catalan, Danish, Czech, Lithuanian, Latvian, Greek, Slovak, Ukrainian, Romanian, Norwegian, Serbian, and Hindi.

You can read the Google Mobile blog for more details.

[jscott418]

You know I did not think this was a big deal until I bought a iPod Touch. Now I know how great it is to have a page fit your hardware format. But I am still scratching my head about how useful a web browser can be on such a small screen. I am just not sold on it ever becoming the preferred tool for web browsing. I still like at least a netbook.

[CreativeMalcolm]

As a cell phone sales person I can tell you there's a small subset of users that do everything from IM, email, search, edit their google calendar and read the news all on their tiny lil wap browsers... it may seem strange to people with iPhones or BlackBerries but it's actually done by a lot of people.