Anyway, as I suspected, the performance is somewhere in between these two extremes, as you’ll see in this demo I threw together on my iPhone 3GS running iOS 4.1: I’m on a WiFi connection, and it’s fairly plucky, but the loading symbol does spin for a while before I get my results. The real benefit comes with the search suggestions, which are nothing new, but now, you can get automatically get results for the first suggested answers with Google Instant. Google Instant Search for Mobile is even more useful on a smartphone, because you’ve got the location services, too, which will show you nearby results. However, on my iPhone 3GS, the screen real estate is really limited—you can really only see one Google Instant Search result without banishing the keyboard first, even though Google automatically clicks the search bar to the top to give you more room. And hitting Done is pretty much as arduous as hitting Search (i.e. not very). Those with physical keyboards will benefit the most from Google Instant Search for Mobile. Anyway, I tried it out on a few queries and it pulled up some pretty good results. But remember: this is still in beta. Google Instant Search for Mobile may occasionally crash your browser, as it did for me when running a search for “Best Buy.” No biggie, though. Comment Name * Email *
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