Google Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is designed to run on phones and tablets that don’t have physical buttons. Instead, the Home, Menu, and Back buttons are on-screen icons that automatically rotate when you change your grip on the screen.

For some reason Google decided to do away with the dedicated Search button though. Originally the search button was a key component of any Android phone or tablet. Over the last few years we’ve seen a number of devices ship without search buttons — and to be honest, I don’t actually use the one I have on my Nexus One smartphone all that often.

Google did replace search with another useful button: recent apps. Instead of tapping-and-holding the Home button in Android 4.0 you can now bring up a list of recent applications by tapping the dedicated button.

But if you can’t live without a dedicated button for bringing up the Android search function, you may not have to. Developer Paul O’Brien is putting the finishing touches on a modification that adds search back to the button bar in Android 4.0.

It looks like there’s plenty of space for all four buttons to peacefully coexist.

via Android Community

Google is rolling out a new version of its Google Search app for Android devices. The new app offers improved search suggestions, faster performance, and the ability to remove items from your search history by long-pressing on them.

The Google Search app is available for free from the Android Market. It supports Android 2.2 and up.

When you start typing in the search box in the new app, it will start to offer suggestions sorted by type. At the top of the list you’ll see web search suggestions, followed by contacts, bookmarks, and other items stored on your phone.

The update also offers country-specific search suggestions.

Google posted details about the new app in a blog post today, but the page has been removed, which would suggest that the app isn’t ready for distribution just yet… but it should be available soon.

Google is starting to roll out a new search page designed for touchscreen displays. The idea is to make it easier to interact with Google’s primary product: its search engine, while using a device with a reasonably large display and touch input.

The new page looks like a cross between the desktop browser interface and the mobile page you’d see when visiting Google.com on an iPhone or Android smartphone. At the top of the page you see a toolbar for Google services, and under that there’s a search bar — just like you’d see in a desktop browser.

But like the mobile version of Google, the new search page lacks any sidebars. Instead you can refine your search using new boxes between the search bar and the results. You can use these tools to switch between all search results, images, videos, places, or other categories.

The image results page has also been revamped with larger picture previews, faster image loading, and the ability to scroll continuously instead of loading a new page page of images.

The update supports the Apple iPad and Android 3.1, but Google is rolling the new interface out in batches, so you may not notice it right away.

Just a few weeks after Google redesigned its mobile search page to include location-based links to restaurants, coffee shops, and bars at the bottom of the main screen, Google had launched another redesign which may be even more useful.

Now instead of only seeing new options on the main search page, there’s a list of options at the top of every Google search page. For instance, if you search for “mobiputing,” you’ll see tabs for web, images, places, and news at the top of the screen. Just scroll down and the tabs will disappear, so they don’t take up that much screen space.

You can also tap the “more” button to view additional options including Google Shopping, Google Books, or YouTube. It’s nice to have the features available from any page, since I rarely actually visit Google.com. Instead I just type a search query into my mobile or desktop browser and the first page I see is the results page.

The new layout appears in both the Android web browser and the mobile Safari browser in iOS.

via Droid Life

Yahoo has launched new mobile apps for iOS and Android which are designed to make it easier to sift through the enormous list of available apps to find the ones you’re looking for. While Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Market let you sort by category or search by name, Yahoo goes a few steps further by offering tools that make it easy to find apps if you don’t know the name or even what you’re looking for in the first place.

The home screen features top picks in a few categories such as Entertainment, Games, and Music. You can tap any of the featured apps to view screenshots, a description, reviews, and a link to related apps. The download button will take you to the App Store or Android Market.

You can also click the category name to see a list of free, paid, or all apps in that category.

But things get really interesting when you start typing in the search box at the top of the screen. You can search by category, name, or description such as “kids games.” As soon as you start typing, search results will appear with apps matching your query at the top of the screen, followed by suggested searches.

I’m not all that impressed with the personalized app suggestions on the home page, but I do really like the search feature.

Since the results change with each new letter you enter, you can keep refining your search based on the suggestions. Honestly, this is the sort of feature I would have expected to see Google bring to the Android Market, since Google offers suggestions and instant results for mobile and desktop web searches. But it’s good to see Yahoo filling a void… although I wonder whether AppSpot will offer new features if and when Google and Apple decide to steal the idea for their own app stores.

Yahoo AppSpot is available as a free download from the App Store and Android Market. Yahoo also offers a web-based version of its app search engine.

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Google has redesigned its mobile search page for Android and iOS. Google has a long track record of basically just showing you a big search box and nothing else on the front page, but now if you enable local search on your mobile browser you’ll also find a few icons along the bottom of the screen for restaurants, coffee and bars. There’s also a “more”icon which provides even more links for quick local searches.

Clicking any of these icons brings up a map with a list of markers for places that match your query. You can scroll through the search results while the map stays at the top showing your current location and the spot where the the business, ATM, park, or other item is located.
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Microsoft has rolled out a new feature that lets iOS users discover mobile apps related to their searches. Say you’re looking up movie showtimes. Movie-related apps such as IMDB or Fandango might show up in your Bing mobile search results. You have to scroll through a few more traditional listings before you find the app results, but once you see them you can click the links to either open apps already installed on your device or bring up a details page in the App Store.

You can also search for specific categories of apps such as “News apps” or “Travel apps.” For some reason these don’t show up at the top of the page either, but you can click “more results” to see a more detailed list of apps matching your query.

Honestly, I’m not sure I want apps showing up in all of my search results, but it’s nice to know that if you’re looking for apps and don’t feel like navigating through the App Store, Bing is there to help. You can use the new feature by firing up your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad web browser and starting a search at Bing.com.

Some iPhone users are beginning to notice some design changes and UI enhancements coming to their Google search page in Safari.

Phone Arena originally noticed the changes, pointing out that large new icons have replaced the smaller text links at the top of the page. The new icons are visible upon running a search query on an iOS device. The icons include Google searches, images, places, and news.

There are also some additional tabs that can be accessed by pressing the drop-down ‘More’ icon. Interestingly enough, there is also a separate category for apps that show some of the most common services offered by Google, such as YouTube, Buzz, Google Translate and Maps.

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