written by paulbutter on 26/10/2005
Good Points
What more can I say? This is Google technology!
Bad Points
You can't view the original versions of images in image search.
It doesn't update frequently, but it's beta so hopefully it will be better.
General Comments
Google WAP is a brilliant search engine!
Google has updated it's WAP search engine lately. It's search technology is the same as they use for web.
Google allows you to search wml and xhtml WAP sites, as well as web sites. The Mobile web search is currently in beta, but it works very well. You can search for images as well.
Their latest bomb is the new web to xhtml-wml converter. Google automatically reformat web pages to reduce their size to fit in your phone. Other products that do it can't come close to Google's html proxy. It reduces the size of the page more than other web-wap translators.
There is no other software company interested in mobile web as much as Google. Google is defining standards and others following. Yahoo has web-image search in WAP, but there is no mobile web search option or web to wap translator.
MSN has no mobile web search option yet. It will be too late when they recognise that the future of mobile internet is bright because the number of mobile phones has already surpassed PC's, and almost all phones have WAP browsers.
When operators reduce the GPRS usage price and connection becomes faster with EDGE and 3G, there will be more WAP users then WEB.