The good: Google Search gives you the power of the company's popular search engine, access to Google apps, and some of the best voice search capabilities available.
The bad: Interacting with Google apps is still a little rough around the edges, with display problems and lack of functionality.
The bottom line: With access to Google apps, the most popular search engine, and Voice Search results that even Siri can't match for speed, this app is a must-download.
The Google Search app brings the company's many Internet resources to your iOS device, and a recent redesign of the interface along with lightning-fast Voice Search make the app even better.
The app offers a clean layout for searches with the familiar Google logo on a white background as your home page when you launch the app. Across the bottom you have three buttons to access Google Apps, newly enhanced Voice Search, and Google Goggles, the feature that lets you snap a picture of something to find out more about it, related products, and other info.
Performing searches is where the app really shines. When you enter a word into the search field, Google Search shows the results you'd expect, Web sites that are relevant to your search term, but now it automatically gives you results based on your location. If you touch a Web site link, the site shows up in a tab. If the site doesn't have what you're looking for, you can go back to your search results by simply swiping to the right to "get rid of" the Web site. Across the bottom of the search results are buttons to search Images, Places, News, Shopping, Videos, Blogs, Discussions, and Books. I really like how you can touch each to see what turns up for your search terms, and it takes almost no time to switch quickly among categories.
The new Voice Search features seem to take a page from Apple's Siri, but use Google's search engine to find your answers. In my testing, it is much faster than Siri. When you ask Google Search a question, the voice recognition is almost always spot-on. The app will only answer your question aloud when it knows the answer (and doesn't just perform a search). But what is really striking is how fast it is. Ask Google Search where a good pizza place is, and it returns results almost immediately. To be fair, Siri offers a cleaner interface when it returns results, but you can't beat the speed of Google Search.
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