Google mobile search: now smarter and more interactive

Google just made searching on mobile even better. The search giant has announced a host of new features to make Googling on your cellphone or tablet more visual and interactive in a bid to make sure you get the answers you’re looking for as easily on mobile as you do on a desktop computer.

According to an official blog post, a number of quick answer features which weren’t previously available on mobile are starting to be rolled out. They include areas such as finance (specifically stock performance indicators), currency conversion, unit conversion, dictionary definitions, local time lookup, and holiday and sunrise times… the things you’d actually use the most on mobile devices. Now you’ll see all the graphs and quick responses at the top of your search results page, just as you would on the desktop version. You can even see the progress of a flight and flight details like arrival time and gate number so you know when and where a plane is set to land.

It’s an international update to mobile search, but it’s only available if you’re searching Google.com in English at the moment, although Google says it is working on rolling the feature out to non-English language users in the near future. It also recently updated its quick answer features for calculator and weather, so you can access a full calculator on the search results page on a phone or tablet, and up to a ten-day weather forecast with a visualisation on tablet devices.