Google Search is Google’s oldest service, and perhaps the one the company is the most well-known for. While it still holds the highest market share in the US and most parts of the world, the Mountain View company announced today quite a few enhancements to make the service work better on tablets.
As Google pointed out in a post on its mobile blog, this update is centered around making the content more prominent and letting it take up a larger portion of the screen, while simplifying what’s secondary, such as search tools:
We’ve simplified the layout of search results pages and increased the size of page contents like text, buttons and other touch targets to make it faster and easier to browse and interact with search results in portrait or landscape view.
Most of the improvements are subtle, but put together they can make quite a large difference. Instead of displaying all search categories, such as Shopping and Maps, they’re now consolidated in a drop-down menu, in order to save precious screen real estate. Tapping on the drop-down menu will bring up all the options available, the screenshot below will give you a glimpse of things which have shaped up.
This new update brings another enhancement to the table. Who would think that something as simple as increasing the sizes of image results could streamline the user experience so much? Google has done just that, this way making doing image searches not only more visually pleasant but also more touch-friendly.
For image results, we focused on improvements that enhance the viewing experience such as enlarged image previews, continuous scroll, and faster loading of image thumbnails.
Google has always attempted to adapt its desktop experience to mobile devices. As smartphone usage increased exponentially over the past few years, Google has been following along every step of the way, making sure that major platforms, not only Google-owned ones, could take advantage of its services as much as possible. The company seems to now be doing the same with tablets, which will surely be welcomed by all users.
According to Google, these enhancements will be rolling out to all those using an iPad and an Android tablets running Android Honeycomb 3.0 or above. Those using Google search on other platforms should be able to see no difference at all, since this update is only meant for the before mentioned tablets tablets.
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