So yesterday something happened. I was going to sleep and I remembered I had a quick search to do. At that time I was not "wearing" my Powerbook (I lately read that the word "use" is not enough to describe this anymore, hehehe). So I had to make the search using my handphone by connecting to Google Mobile through GPRS. So I did. However, although I was using Google Mobile, results that had been returned were not "Mobile websites". When one is using a smart handphone with the usual small screen, this is quite a problem. Think about it: the user does get the results but he cannot really visit the URLs that have been returned.
So the question or suggestion is: would it be possible to have an option in Google Mobile to force the Google search engine to only return websites that can be viewed as well as are made for handphones? With such an option, the user can decide whether he wants mobile websites returned or just normal general websites. Then again, the guys at Google are quite smart and might have a hack like that I have no idea about.
What do you think?
Update:
One of my friends just called me about this post: it seems like there is actually something like that coming from Google. I believe i haven't paid much attention but when i logged back into Google Mobile I found out that there is "Mobile Web" search but at the moment it's in Beta edition. However after a few tests, it seems to work quite well. :-)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Essentially virtually any web page should work perfectly on a mobile device. The whole point behind web standards like HTML and CSS is to separate the content from the presentation. You have presentation-neutral semantic HTML and you can use different stylesheets to style that page according to the user's media type. In other words, one stylesheet for a normal screen and one for a mobile screen. The correct stylesheet should be correctly selected automatically. And even with no stylesheet applied things should work on any device. So any page at any IRI should be displayed perfectly no matter which device you're on.
ReplyDeleteBandwidth restrictions is still an issue with this though; although a well-designed HTML page should be lightweight anyway.
So I don't really think Google needs to bother with this; I would rather point fingers at the "International Web Development Impaired" for this mess.
But since we're in this mess already I guess some hacking with Google would be handy.
Also, AFAIK Opera has the only mobile browser that does the stylesheet thing correctly.