As the many thousands of people who have Google as their homepage already know, search can be as simple as a box on a page.  Mobile search, however, requires something of a paradigm shift; no matter how glossy the UI, tactile the interface or clever the design, emulating desktop search on a cellphone is a frustrating, scroll-heavy experience.  Sarah Lipman, of interface design company Power2B, discusses the demands for a semantically-linked, three-dimensional mobile search environment in an article for MEX today, resolving in what she calls “mesh connectivity vs. linearity” - where search navigation is guided one step at a time through a series of clarifying options.

Unlike on a full-sized computer, where search usually consists of experimenting with different options generated by a search engine (such as Google) until the “right” result is found, information exploring on a cellphone tends to demand faster, more instantly accurate results.  While so far the Android project has demonstrated videos of, say, Google Maps resolved on a small screen, or given us a microcosm of the Google homepage on a mobile handset, there seems little different in the search dynamic to what you would find on your desktop.  Undoubtedly familiar, it is nonetheless susceptible to the same issue as on any mobile-formatted site: that it inevitably lacks in comparison to the full-featured version.

Google can rarefy its search algorithms, but there needs to be equal work on the way search is approached and managed for the user themselves.  Research shows patience is particularly lacking when accessing the internet on some sort of portable device, and if Android is to definitively answer criticisms such as those from AT&T recently, it will need to present itself as more than just its traditional site rendered on a QVGA screen.