Android’s search gets a lot richer than the iPhone’s
If there’s one area where Google’s Android platform should blow Apple’s iPhone completely out of the water, it’s search.
So Google’s aiming to do just that with the Quick Search Box it released today for Android-based phones. It combines web search with search inside your phone. That means you can look up your personal contacts and do a generic Google search from the same place. It also learns from your prior behavior — if you’ve looked up a specific stock in the past, Android will pre-load the stock in the future as you type in its ticker symbol, and it will automatically refresh the price, too.
If you’re searching for information on the web, you don’t have to load a browser or the requisite app. Apple’s iPhone, in contrast, makes you load the weather app to look up local temperatures.
What’s also unique is that Android’s search pulls up data from inside apps. It doesn’t just look for titles of apps that match your query.
In fact, the designer behind Quick Search Box, Nicholas Jitkoff, is responsible for Quicksilver, a product cherished by Apple fanboys worldwide. Dubbed the “Mac Swiss Army Knife,” Quicksilver made it very fast to find any Mac program, file or folder with a few keystrokes and load it.
Too bad Google scooped him up first.
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About the Author, Kim-Mai Cutler
Kim-Mai was born and raised a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in Cupertino by a devout Hewlett-Packard family. After attending UC Berkeley, Kim-Mai worked for Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in New York, Los Angeles, London and Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter at @kimmaicutler, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.