Google Experiments With Gesture-Based Search On AndroidGoogle Experiments With Gesture-Based Search On Android

Imagine being able to find something on your smartphone just by drawing the letter "B" on the screen. Google hopes you'll do just that with its new Gesture Search application for Android handsets, which lets users search for items by drawing gestures on the display.It's a neat idea, though it has some limitations. This week Google introduced a beta application for Android devices running system 2.0 and higher called Gesture Search. The application, which must be downloaded from the Android Market, is basically what the name implies.

Once the app is downloaded and installed, users can open it, draw a letter on the screen, and the software will parse through the phone's contacts, bookmarks and music tracks to find everything that matches. The software will pick only those items that start with the letter drawn by the user. So if you draw an "A", it will find all the contacts, bookmarks and songs that begin with the letter "A".

Google says that it has built in a rough form of error control for those who have awful handwriting (like me). It explains that if you draw an "A", but it looks more like an "H", it will display the words that begin with both "A" and "H". Not a perfect solution, but a helpful one nonetheless.

If you want to clear the search parameter, simple swipe from left to right. If you want to delete the most recent letter draw on the screen, swipe from right to left. Google notes that the software will monitor searches. So, for example, if you perform a search for words that begin with "Q" often, it will automatically show you the results that you pick most often after performing that search.

The app can't be used to search the Web, and rightly so. Searching for the letter "A" on the Web woud return a ridiculous and useless number of results.

Right now, this Labs experiment is only available to Android 2.0 devices in the U.S. Google didn't say if/when it would expand the feature to other Android systems or regions.