Tag Archive for mobile search

Google mobile search is now faster – about 150 milliseconds!

Posted on December 10, 2014 by

Google’s mobile search has got faster – to be exact, 100-150 milliseconds faster.

Google mobile searchAccording to a Google+ post by the Google Chrome Developers, when you click on one of the search results, the browser begins fetching the destination page… & here’s the trick: Google also provides a hint to the browser indicating which other critical resources it should fetch in parallel to speed up rendering of the destination page.

According to Google, this is a powerful pattern & one that searchers can use to accelerate their Sites as well.

“The key insight is that we are not speculatively prefetching resources and do not incur unnecessary downloads. Instead, we wait for the user to click the link and tell us exactly where they are headed, and once we know that, we tell the browser which other resources it should fetch in parallel – aka, reactive prefetch”, according to Ilya Grigorik of Google.

For now though, this feature is enabled only for users of Google Chrome on Android, as it is the only browser that supports dynamically inserted prefetch hints & allows prefetch requests to persist across navigations.

Image Credit: Google+

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Jelly: A search app with an element of Q and A built in

Posted on January 12, 2014 by

By Anand

The crowdsourced Q&A routine is not a new concept. Google & Yahoo! Answers tried it on the Web with a debatable amount of success, followed by Quora & any number of such knockoffs. The evolution of crowdsourced answers has since moved on to smartphone apps trying to leverage the power of Big Data & social networks to provide answers to user-posed questions.

But none of them has really taken off big time. Now comes Jelly, a free app for iOS & Android that lets you ask a question or answer one. There’s a lot more of Twitter in it than you might think, not least because one of the co-founders is Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. For the record, San Francisco-based Jelly HQ was co-founded in April 2013 by Biz Stone & Ben Finkel. Jelly has closed a Series A round of VC funding led by Spark Capital. Another one of the investors & a member of the board is Bijan Sabet, who was an early investor in Twitter too.

Jelly changes how we find answers because it uses pictures and people in our social networks. It turns out that getting answers from people is very different from retrieving information with algorithms. Also, it has the added benefit of, well, being fun.

The way it works is that the user can pose a question along with an accompanying picture taken with the phone’s camera or found using the app’s built-in image search function. Other Jelly users who are in the user’s social network of connections on Twitter & Facebook will see it on their display, & may choose to read & answer it. The picture is required because, as Stone explains in a blog post on Jelly.co, “In a world where 140 characters is considered a maximum length, a picture really is worth a thousand words…

Images are in the foreground of the Jelly experience because they add depth and context to any question.” Oh, by the way, these guys chose the name Jelly because they think of the app and its loosely distributed network of people as being similar to a jellyfish with a loose network of nerves that functions as its brain.

 

Click here to download Jelly on Android

Click here to download Jelly on iOS

 

Image/Video Credit: Jelly/Vimeo

 

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