Without search engines there would be
no internet, because people simply wouldn't know where to go or what sites to visit,
so it’s no surprise that search technology has invaded the world’s app stores
too. All the big names are present in Google Play, although some interesting
smaller apps promise a handful of unique features too.
We review six search apps below. As
usual, all are free in the Google Play store, and all were tested on a phone
and a tablet running Android 4.3 Jelly Bean.
Bing
The first thing to strike those using Microsoft’s Bing app will
be the wallpaper images, which are carried across from the Bing website and greet users when they start the
app. This makes using Bing a unique experience.
Google
has its doodles. Bing has its wallpapers. Tap the screen and four zones are indicated. Tapping these reveals trivia or whimsy about the image, and tapping
a download
button at the bottom right even lets you set
the high-res image as your
launcher wallpaper. The app works equally well on both tablet and phone too.
However, nice wallpaper doesn’t
necessarily make a good search app, and to access the search function you need
only tap in the search field that remains present at all times at the top of
the screen. Instead of typing you can also tap the microphone icon to speak
your search term, and recognition is reasonably quick and accurate — about as
accurate as any modern speech recognition, anyway.
Once a search term has been entered,
results appear instantly in the main window and look much like the Bing
website. The app includes its own browser engine so that any results you tap
open instantly within the same app window. The browser is basic but simple: you
can create bookmarks, for example, and a primitive browser tab system is
implemented that isn’t particularly easy to use. Other useful functions offered
include the ability to save a screenshot of the site to the photo gallery and
to share the URL in question in the usual way using the Android Send system.
What’s curiously lacking is any ability to open the site in your regular
browser or, for that matter, any other browser.
Tapping the Bing menu button at the top
left of the screen reveals a handful of other functions, including the ability
to jump straight to a weather report for the local area (based on the fuzzy
geolocation of your IP address and not, alas, your device’s GPS hardware). You
can also jump straight to special sections of Bing, such as Images, Trends
(popular searches), News. Maps and Gallery (previous wallpaper images).
Signing in with your Microsoft ID will
let you sync bookmarks between devices and browsers. The tantalizing Bing
Rewards system lets you earn points for each search you make, which can then be
traded in for prizes, but unfortunately this is only open to US residents at
the moment.
This is a nice app overall, but we’re
not sure there’s enough here to convert even the most reticent Google user. The
bolt- on gimmicks are all well and good, but none actually relate to search
technology. It’s with search results, both in quality and presentation, that
the innovation should be taking place.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is rapidly gaining
prominence as perhaps the only serious threat to Google’s virtual monopoly, and
it’s doing so by inverting Google’s rules: whereas Google wants to gobble up
every scrap of data you generate, DuckDuckGo promises never to track you and to
entirely respect your privacy. It still shows adverts, but these are based
simply on the search term you type and not your past browsing habits or Gmail
messages, as with Google and indeed many other search outfits.
However, the DuckDuckGo app isn’t just
a search app. Its full title is DuckDuckGo Search & Stories. This is an app
with a schizoid personality. One half is a content aggregator, which is to say
the app raids popular websites to grab the juiciest headlines and stories.
These sites include Ars Technica, Reddit, Life Hacker, Digg, The Verge and
others. There’s nothing that complicated going on — the headlines
are simply presented on the opening screen of the app, and tapping any of them
takes you to the site to read the full thing (within the app itself, which
includes a built-in browser). The link can be shared in the usual way, saved as
a bookmark within the app or opened in another browser installed on the system.
The app also includes a Readability mode that can make some web pages easier to
digest by cutting out extraneous page elements such as navigation toolbars.
However, at its heart the app is a
search tool, and typing a search term into the field at the top of the screen
will show the results within the app itself. Tapping any of the results opens
it for viewing in the app, although open the Settings menu and you can switch
to always opening links in your favorite browser, such as Google Chrome or
Mozilla Firefox. This makes 100% sense yet is not found in most of the other
apps here, which prefer to keep you within their walled gardens.
Searches can be boosted by DuckDuckGo’s
proprietary !bang syntax, by which you can limit searches to particular sites
or interest areas by specifying a particular letter or word after an
exclamation mark. Details can be found at duckduckgo.com/ bang.html.
Alas, a few things are missing compared
to other apps reviewed here. There’s no voice search feature, for example,
although this is perhaps of limited use in real life — how many times
have you heard anybody dictate a search to their phone or tablet rather than
type it? Exactly.
This app provides a nice little taster
of DuckDuckGo, and the content aggregation provides a good reason to keep it in
the memory on your device. Recommended.
Yahoo Search
This is primarily a phone app. It’ll
work on a tablet but only by pretending the device is a phone by forcing you to
hold it in portrait orientation and making on-screen items like buttons and
text very small. Therefore we focus on the phone experience here.
The first thing to strike us about the
app is its simplicity. Once started, all you see is a search field at the top
of the screen. There’s no wallpaper, as with Bing, and no news stories, as with
DuckDuckGo. You can type your search or tap the microphone icon to dictate it,
in which case speech recognition is identical to all other types of speech
recognition on mobile devices: reasonably accurate and reasonably fast.
A list of search results appears in the
app window, and tabs at the bottom let you look through web, image and video
results. Tapping on any result opens it within the app itself, which has a
primitive browser built in. Unfortunately, while you can share the URL in
various ways, such as an email message or via DropBox, you can’t select to open
the site, image or video in a different browser installed on the system. To
escape viewing the site, you must tap the Done button or tap your device’s back
button (if it has one), which will take you back to the results.
Tapping the menu icon at the top left
lets you sign into Yahoo in order to log your search history for use elsewhere
(although it’s not accessible within the app itself), but there appears to be
no other benefit to signing in. The Settings menu also lets you switch
instantly to any other Yahoo apps you have installed on your device.
Options within the actual Settings
dialogue box include the ability to set Safe Search, so you don’t get any
unpleasant entries polluting your search results, and the ability to
deactivate the aforementioned search
history feature. You can also clear your search history.
While simplicity might be key to an
app’s success, there just isn’t very much within this app to justify using it.
With apps we look for innovation — clever tricks that make using a
particular service more intuitive or fun. There isn’t any of that here.
Perhaps the biggest negative factor is
that Yahoo search results nowadays are provided by Microsoft Bing. Yahoo is no
longer a search engine and hasn’t been since 2009. In other words, you might as
well use the Bing app, which has more features and looks a whole lot better.
Izik
It’s hard to know where to start with
this app. First there’s the app’s title, which in the grand tradition of edgy
innovation leaves the user unsure how to pronounce it: is it izzik, as in
indigo or eye-zik, as in Isaac? Then there’s the app’s tagline:
‘Take search for a joy ride.’ We’re
guessing the term joy ride has a different meaning in the US, where this app
originates and doesn’t imply scooting around a council estate in an XR3i.
Then there’s perhaps the most
astonishing fact: this is an app designed for tablets. It works just fine on a
phone, but in the world of Android, the idea of giving tablet first bite of the
cherry is virtually unprecedented. This isn’t just talk either, and the app
makes good use of gestures, as well as increased screen space. Search results
appear under various category headings, including Looking For, Top Results and
Images, although others might appear depending on the search term. Search for
Abraham Lincoln, for example, and History and American History headings will
appear too. Each category is shown as a horizontal strip above or below the
others, and using the pinch-to-expand gesture on any result expands an excerpt
from the site for quick viewing.
Tapping the site opens it for viewing
in the main app window, and although the app’s listing within Google Play
claims you can then share the page with others, we couldn’t find any such
options. Nor was there an option to open the page in a different browser or
even copy the URL, so you can do so manually. When searching for images, you
can’t save the image to your photo collection. All you can do in lzik is view
stuff, which is very limiting.
Upon running for the first time, the
app installs an always visible blue SEARCH icon at the right of the screen.
This sticks around even when you’re running other apps, and tapping it expands
an Izik search bar. We’re not entirely sure this is a good idea, but it can be
turned off within the app by opening the app menu by tapping the top left icon.
Also on this menu you can see trending search terms, although in our tests these
were all preceded by ‘non_us’ — a remnant of some kind of filtering
system we’re not supposed to see, perhaps, but another indication that not much
testing has taken place outside the US.
lzik’s clever presentation of data
under category headings works very well but only with well-rounded and somewhat
hackneyed search queries. It’s a great app to use for homework assignments, for
example, or finding out about Lady Gaga. However, it’s less useful if you’re
trying to find out the valve timings on a 1992 Vauxhall Corsa. For that kind of
thing, Google is still king.
Super Search
Out in the wilds of the Google Play
store, it can sometimes feel like the Windows shareware scene circa 1995.
Enthusiastic developers release apps to scratch an itch, and the apps aren’t
always pretty but they work — to a fashion. Super Search is a typical
example. Coming out of the Simple Game Studios in Pakistan, the app’s intention
is to provide instant access to most of the major search engines, as well as
instant searches of popular sites like Linkedin and Wikipedia.
At the most basic usage, the user types
a search term and then selects a site from the drop-down lists below in order
to initiate a search. Once you do so, you’ll be bounced out to your favorite
browser app to view the results, but nothing magical has occurred. What you see
is what you’d get if you simply visited the site yourself and typed the term
into the search field.
However, the app’s strength lies in
Multiple Search Mode. Here you can type a search term and select from more than
one search engine or website. You could search Bing at the same time as you
search Sky News and Wikipedia, for example. The results are then shown within
the app itself as a series of sites that are stacked on top of each other.
Tapping any result in the pages you see then opens it in your usual browser.
It’s not hard to fault this app. It
can’t be used in portrait orientation, for example, so you’ll have to hold your
phone horizontally if you wish to use it. But perhaps the biggest crime is that
the app is really a desktop app in terms of design, with a desktop way of
thinking. Ticking off selections from big long lists of sites isn’t how things
should be done on tablets and phones.
However, the core functionality is
present and it works: if you want to be able to search several sites at once
and look through the results very quickly indeed, then this app can’t really be
beaten.
Disconnect Search
Online privacy is one of the biggest
issues of our age, and search engines are some of the biggest privacy abusers.
You pay for sites like Google not using money but by giving them unadulterated
access to your personal data.
Disconnect Search aims to get around
this data theft by using virtual private network technology to let you search
anonymously. In other words, in addition to avoiding tracking cookies, the site
hides your all-important IP address from the search engine too. This way,
there’s no way of tracking you, although we have to assume that the Disconnect
Search app itself is discreet and doesn’t track what you’re up to.
The app is actually very basic and
little more than a front- end for the disconnect.me website — once you’ve
typed a search query, you’re bounced out to your favourite browser, where the
result will be ready and waiting. We assume that the search query is sent via a
secure connection to the disconnect. me website, where the results are fetched
for you.
The site defaults to searching Google,
but a drop-down box at the top lets you switch this to Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo
or Blekko. A search widget is also available as part of the app and can be
revealed in the usual way by scrolling to the widget list in the app drawer.
This cuts out the app entirely and lets you send search terms straight to
disconnect.me.
There’s not much more we can say about
Disconnect Search. It’d be nice to be able to select your search engine before
tapping to search, and perhaps to set one as default too, but this is hardly a
big problem when 99% of us still use Google. Viewing results within the app
itself might make for speedier searching process too, but jumping out to your favourite browser hardly takes a long time.
