When people started browsing the internet on their mobile phones for the first time, they typically navigated to websites they were already used to browsing on their PC. This made the first smartphones rather horrific since they were not only terribly slow compared to the devices we have on the market now, but they also had small screens, and worst of all very few websites actually had a mobile optimized version of their site. Fast forward to today and things are a lot better thanks to high speed networks, huge displays, and dual core processors. Still though, is there a better way to navigate the internet than how you already do today? Chances are if you need to find something you start with Google. The whole scrolling through a list of 10 links, page after page of them, is getting rather stale, isn’t it? Enter Do@ (pronounced “do” *pause* “at”), an iPhone application that doesn’t list search results, but instead shows you your query entered into a variety of mobile services. Watch the video below to get a better understanding of Do@:
After playing with this for a handful of random searches we’re both highly impressed and terribly let down. The application takes ages to load results, even on our 40 Mbps home broadband connection. Scrolling also isn’t as polished as we’d like it to be, and there’s no way to set preferred web properties. Google’s list of 10 links may look damn right ancient in 2011, but their philosophy of focusing on speed is what keeps us using their product. We do think that Do@ is onto something, but they need to make their application faster.
Say they do manage to make their app more responsive, we’re not sure Do@ is going to take off because if you’re searching for a movie, you open the IMDB app on your phone. If you’re searching for the price of a stock, you open the stocks application on your phone. And so on and so forth. Silos exist because people prefer certain search engines depending on the context of their search. Lumping together 6 results for the film “Rear Window” doesn’t exactly help us get to information any faster.