Find What You're Looking For

Find What You're Looking For

Search engines allow you to quickly access information on the Web. They work just as well on the mobile Web if you know how to use them.

Search engines are the best tools for keeping track of the ever-changing landscape of the Web. You can think of a search engine as being a giant portal one with the entire Web as its "content provider portal." The best search engine on the Web, Google, also has a mobile search engine specially designed for mobile phones. You can reach it via the URL http://www.google.com/wml from your Nokia phone's Services browser. The Google WML search engine allows you to search either the entire Web with all HTML web pages (see Figure), or the mobile Web with WML pages only.

Using the Google WML search web site

The cool thing about Google's wireless search is that it supports a "number" input mode, whereby it guesses search query words from the numbers you enter. For example, to enter the word "book" in the normal input mode, you need to press 2 twice, press 6 three times, press 6 three times again, and finally press 5 twice. But with the Google number mode, you can simply type in the number 2665. Of all the possible combinations from those four digits, Google will figure out that "book" is a common word, and you probably intend to search for it. The Google number mode is very similar to the T9 input method [Hack #58], except that Google processes the translation on a backend server and has a much larger word dictionary.

In fact, the Google wireless search page itself is accessible via the URL http://www.466453.com/. The numbers 4, 6, 6, 4, 5, 3 correspond to the letters g, o, o, g, l, e on a mobile phone keypad. It is T9 in the URL! This all-number URL is very fast to type on a keypad and is easy to remember.

Figure shows how to access the Google number search web page, set the search option to Number Mobile Web, and then search the phrase "2665." The returned results are WML pages related to "book." (If Google insists on loading in full mode, you can force the small-screen version by going to http://www.466453.com/wml.)

Searching mobile web sites via the Google number mode