Google Custom Search for your smartphone

In our recent Product Ideas survey, one of the most-requested features was about enabling a mobile version of Custom Search. Guess what: It's here! As announced on the Google Mobile blog, Custom Search now enables a rich interactive mobile experience on high-end devices such as Android-powered phones, iPhone, iPod touch, and Palm Pre.

Try it out on your phone right now: search for user-generated content (e.g., search for [maradona]) from sites like Wikipedia, Knol, etc., or learn all about the latest and greatest Custom Search features on our product's mobile search engine (e.g., search for [snippets]).

Custom Search engine results can be embedded in your own site, but website owners can also choose to have Google host the search results page. You can now redirect visitors using these high-end mobile devices to Google-hosted search results, and we will serve up search results optimized for these devices. Better yet, we create a Google-hosted home page for every Custom Search engine that we create (even if you decide to host the results on your own website). Starting today, users who arrive at the home page for your Custom Search engine will be automatically served pocket-sized Custom Search results, along with your search engine customizations, like your labels and promotions.

All you need to do at your own end is redirect users who arrive at your website on one of the supported mobile devices to the hosted Custom Search home page. Another alternative is to provide a button or link on your web site that directs people to your Custom Search home page, whose URL looks like (you will need to replace the ID after "cx=" with your own Custom Search engine ID):

http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=013315504628135767172:d6shbtxu-uo

Of course, if you'd like to serve these mobile results from your own website, you can replicate the functionality of the mobile home page on your own website. This page uses the Custom Search Element. If you do, you will still need to take care of the redirection at your website so that mobile users receive mobile-friendly search results automatically.

If Google web search is the entry point for navigating the web, we hope you'll use this interactive Custom Mobile Search entry point to help people navigate your own web content when they need information on the go!

Posted by: Radu Cornea, Software Engineer and John Skidgel, Senior Interaction Designer