It’s not exactly hard to believe that Google are still going to push search on Android in a big way, let’s face it, it’s the main reason Google created Android in the first place. Times have changed since the days of the G1 and Google Search has become a seriously powerful tooth both on mobile and the desktop.
With Jelly Bean, Google are revamping search like they’ve never done before. By harnessing the power of the Knowledge Graph and their own excellent voice recognition software, search on Android has gotten so slick, its sexy. Thanks to Knowledge Graph, search will now display content in an eye friendly manner in the form of a card, these cards might feature a picture with some dates or a picture with some figures. This sort of revamp is going to get you those burning answers faster and more fluidly.
With this new search, Google has decided to not get into the voice assistant game as we thought they would but rather, they’ve made the web come to you in a quicker, more fluid manner. For instance, you can search by voice for the weather and up pops a nice weather card, do the same for restaurants etc and you have a card with relevant info right there at your finger tips. If you’re more comfortable browsing through the web results then you can simply bring this up with the nav bar at the bottom of searches.
Alongside these improvements to Search in general, Google are introducing Google Now. Hugo Barra, Director of Product Management, introduced the new addition by giving the audience a few examples. The new service will integrate all of Google’s services into one, if you were taking your regular route to work Now would check the traffic and suggest an alternative route with a mini map and a link to Maps itself, if there were trouble spots on the way. Google Now also keeps a look out for local restaurants and brings up info for them as well. The killer feature of Now however, is its ability to carry on learning and become increasingly useful as time goes on.
If this has you at all interested, you’d be crazy if this didn’t excite you, then you’ll be able to enjoy it when Jelly Bean hits your Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus or XOOM next month.
Some other tidbits for Search is the much welcomed addition of online voice recognition, this spreads throughout the whole OS but, when you’re out of 3G you need the phone to know what you want as fast as possible to offset those horrific loading times, with the voice engine now embedded into Jelly Bean getting search results fast wherever you are is a possibility. For more info on Google Now, check out the video from Google below: