Google Unveils Search for Small Screens

Google on Thursday launched its latest mobile search effort that links users to sites that have been designed specially for smaller screens.

To enable such a feature, Google has crawled the Web for pages built using XHTML and compiled a separate index from its standard search engine.

"How different is it than standard web search? There are sites out there that have already been designed for your mobile phone, which makes them more navigable on the small screen. So we've created an index specifically for these sites," said Google software engineer Steven Schirripa.

To access results of pages formatted for mobile devices such as phones and PDAs, users simply type in a search query and choose Mobile Web (beta) as the search option. AOL launched a similar feature in April, which automatically adapts Web pages to the dimensions of small mobile screens.

Google previously offered a number of mobile search capabilities, including local and image searches, and Google SMS - a service that uses text messaging to relay answers.

"Your phone can now be that much more useful," added Schirripa.