Google just announced an update to its Product Search. It is now optimized for smartphones and other mobile devices. I gave it a spin today and I love its clean and simple interface. Here are a few screenshots to give you an idea. By the way, this is the first time I am taking screenshots from my G1, here is a very good blog post describing how to do it.
Search results
I took Jabra SP700 Speakerphone for an example. This is how the search results screen looks. The Options menu allows sortiing by price, product rating, and also offers a few basic filters.
Product overview
Clicking on the first entry in the list will open this overview screen. The overview is not available for all products and I can’t figure out what the criteria is. For example Nintendo Wii has it but iPod Touch doesn’t.
Product details
This screen opens when you click on the product image/description on the overview screen (if there is one). It shows a bigger product image and the complete product description.
Product reviews
This is a list of all the product reviews aggregated from different sources. I find the reviews summary with the bars very easy to read.
Technical Specifications
Not much to say here. This is just a list of basic technical details about the product. I usually don’t trust these and make sure to re-check the specs at the store before I but the product.
Optimizing Product Search for mobile devices is a very timely step for Google. Mobile web use is growing strong and missing out on that growth would be very unfortunate for the company.
Google just sweetened the deal by adding bar code scanning to their product search
http://googlemobile.blogspot.c.....d-now.html