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Google Attempts To Speed Mobile Search Times

Google took steps to accelerate the time it takes to load Google's home page on mobile phones and initiate a search. I took Google for a spin on several different phones. Is it really that much faster?

To be honest, I don't notice any speed improvements in the time it takes to launch the Google home page on two of my three phones. First I loaded Google on the iPhone. That took about 8.1 seconds. I then shut the phone down, rebooted it, cleared the browser's cache, and tried again. Second time around it took 9.3 seconds. Now that I knew Google's home page was in my cache, I attempted it one more time. Third time resulted in an 8.3-second load time. Pretty consistent.

Google says, "When you navigate to google.com in your browser, we cache the homepage on your phone. If you bookmark this homepage, then returning to Google using the bookmark is almost instantaneous. Whether you come to Google by browser or through our new search plug-in, starting your search is now quicker and simpler than ever before." Sorry, Google, but any improvements on the iPhone were negligible.

Same goes for a Windows Mobile device I have. Even with Google's home page loaded in the cache, it still took about 6.4 seconds to load, which was not much faster than the 7.1 seconds it took to load before it was cached.

A Nokia N95 with Opera Mini was totally different. Now, Google already allows you to initiate a search from the home screen of S60 devices with a tool on the phone. This is by far the fastest way to perform a mobile search with your S60 phone. Simply type in your search query on the home screen, hit search, and away you go. Going to the browser to perform searches first typically takes much longer.

Once you have the browser running and an active connection to the network, Google's home page loaded in 3.6 seconds, 3.5 seconds, and 3.2 seconds in my triple test. This is pretty fast, but the problem with S60 phones is that you have to take several steps to open the browser, connect to the network, and load your home page. The entire process often takes about 10 to 15 seconds on the N95. Going through all those steps is no faster, so the improvements here are only noticeable if you already have an open connection to the network.

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