Google Search for Android
Those who are used to iOS will often have a first impression of Android which is skewed by the features they perceive as missing. Some features are in fact missing, but more often they are present in a different and sometimes less intuitive form.
For example, when I switched from an iPhone to an Android phone, I missed the ability to quickly get to the top of a web page by tapping on the top bar. However, I soon realized that 99% of the time I was using that shortcut on an iPhone, the purpose was to get back to the address or search bar. On Android, pressing the dedicated search button takes you to a combined address/search bar, which is one less tap than you would need on iOS (one tap to get to the top, and another to get to the address bar).
When my brother Bijan started using Android more heavily, one of the features he missed was the ability to search Contacts from a centralized search. The iPhone has a Search app which automatically searches everything on the phone. When Bijan would start to enter his wife’s name, her contact entry would immediately spring to the top of the list. However, using the Search widget (which duplicates the functionality of the dedicated Search button) did not seem to search contacts at all. What a strange omission.
Today I was playing with the Google Search widget and for the first time noticed that the box which comes up after clicking on the blue “g” has an icon in the upper right corner for Settings:
Tapping this Settings icon takes you to a page where you can configure what will be included amongst searchable items:
After a change in settings:
Why not have search default to including everything, the way it does in iOS? At least part of the reason seems to be security related. I recently installed an excellent app call ChromeMarks which lets me access my Chrome bookmarks on an Android phone. The developer site lists as one of the features of this app:
You can search your Chrome bookmarks and folders from within the app by pressing the search button (or menu, search) or by using the Android Search Widget.
To search via the Android Search widget, you need to enable this manually (an Android security feature will not let apps enable this for you).
I was listening to a TWIT podcast recently, and Jerry Pournelle made a comment along the lines of:
Everything on a Mac is either simple or or it’s utterly impossible.
That statement holds even more true if one substitutes “iOS” for “a Mac”. Case in point, I’m not aware of any way to include web search results in the home screen search on an iPhone.
In contrast, Android isn’t always simple, but just about everything is possible.
There are plenty of additional ways to search in Android not mentioned here, some of which are nicely covered in this article at TechRepublic.
