Google Product Search now has increased functionality on mobile devices, including ones that run Google’s Android operating system, and iPhones. As Google Android begins to penetrate the smartphone and mini-notebook, i.e., "netbook" market, Google has tailored core products to run more efficiently on the OS.
Google
announced a mobile-friendly version of its Product Search application, emphasizing
its utility for iPhone and Android-powered devices, in an April 23 corporate
blog posting.
Google Product Search,
which can be found here, allows
users to type whatever they’re searching for – such as "server software" – into
the search bar and receive results pulled from a variety of shopping sites.
On their smartphone’s
browser, users can navigate to Google.com, type in the name of a particular
product, and then click or touch the "Shopping" link that appears in the search
results. They could also click "More" on Google’s main search page, and then
click "Shopping" to access Product Search.
"Say you're in a store and
having a hard time deciding between two products," Rob Stacey, a
software
engineer with the Google mobile team, wrote on the Official Google
Mobile Blog. "Instead of waiting to go home to check the Internet for
ratings and reviews,
you can now get all of this information right there on the spot."
Google has increasingly
geared itself toward smartphone variants on its core products, particularly as
the iPhone gains in popularity and Google’s Android operating system becomes
more prevalent within the global mobile-device ecosystem.
On April 14, Google
released the Google Android 1.5 "Early Look" SDK for developers, including
a number of new-and-improved tools such as user interface refinements to the
browser. The Early Look SDK features a different component structure than
earlier SDKs, and does not work with older Eclipse plug-ins (ADT 0.8), which in
turn do not work with the new Eclipse plug-in (ADT 0.9).
"We're already aware of many,
many uses of Android, which as you know is open source," Schmidt added. "The
open source part of the strategy is working."
Since making its debut in
August 2008, Android has been slowly penetrating the mobile market, with analysts
predicting that it will be running on 12 percent of global smartphone shipments
by 2012. Companies ranging from Dell
to Hewlett-Packard and T-Mobile have been planning a variety of applications
for Android, which by the end of 2009 will likely begin a substantial
rollout into the mini-notebook, i.e., "netbook" market.
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