App Review - Google's Gesture Search

Google's Gesture Search is one of my favorite apps on Android phone. Touch the Gesture icon and you will be presented with a blank screen to write on. As you write letters and words onto the screen, Gesture looks up shortcuts to applications, contacts, music, and browser bookmarks on your phone.

Gesture Search is similar to Spotlight (for Mac) and Launchy (Windows and Linux); it is an app that tries to help you find what you want using completion and prediction. Given the number of apps, contacts, and music on your phone, it can quickly become too tedious to navigate. Gesture Search lets you find what your're looking for with one touch and a few "gestures" on your screen.

Download and Install

Android link (phone required):	Marketplace

Tutorial

Touch to start. You will want a shortcut on your Home screen. Read the terms and conditions and hit Accept if you agree.

You start at a blank screen. Start writing on the screen with your finger to search. Here, I clumsily wrote a letter "G":

Recognizing the letter "G", Android shows a list of "things" you are interested in. This could be an app (Gmail) or a bookmark (http://espn.go.com):

To refine your search, just keep writing. Let's say I am interested in the "Google Reader", which is not entirely in view for me to select. So I write the letter "O" onto the screen.

Recognizing the sequence "G-O", here's the new list of options:

Google reader, one of my bookmarks, is now #4 in the list, making it easy to select and find.

If you go back to Gesture again, you will see the last selected shortcut by default. This turns out to be a convenient way to access your last application. Let's do the same search again, go ahead and draw "G" onto the screen. 

This time, with just one letter drawn, "Google Reader" becomes the #1 option on your screen. Gesture keeps track of your favorite shortcuts and tries to intelligently show you the most relevant results.

How to use

Gesture does incremental search (showing refined results as you draw) and prediction (using history and heuristics to provide its best results). I find it to be extremely useful for navigating my gigantic contact list. In most cases, I can get to the contact I am looking with just one drawing.

While Gesture can be used to launch apps, it probably is most useful for those rarely used apps and your contacts. Your most used apps should have shortcut icons on your Home screen - Gesture being one of them. Then use Gesture Search to look for the things that you don't use that often. You should get rid of the "Contact list" shortcut completely, as Gesture Search is simply much more convenient.

If you take a look at the settings menu, you will see that you can enable "Search Music".

You probably don't want to enable searching music. If you have hundreds of songs like I do, your songs will clutter up your Gesture search. This option is disabled by default for a good reason.

Areas of Improvement

Gesture Search is a Google Labs product. This explains why its not included on Android phones by default. It also means that it is actively being looked at for improvement. 

A great area for improvement would be the ability to support non-latin languages such as Chinese characters. Although this is likely to be quite difficult to implement.

If gesture can recognize multiple letters drawn together in cursive as opposed to drawing one letter at a time, it would significantly speed up searches.

A easier improvement would be a reorganization of search results. Instead of one list, it would be nice to have results grouped by type:

This should make it a bit easier to look for the desired result when the search returns too many similar results (when "searching for music" is enabled, for example). This UI also provides a point for the user to specify the "type" of result they are interested in, which is missing today. The trade off is that you'd lose screen real estate, but the trade off might be worth it. 

Another option would be to have filter buttons that allows the user to specify what kind of result to look for. This might waste less screen space, but requires an additional user interaction. 

As gesture search continue to expand the number of searchable items, a better filtering UI will be come more important.

I find myself using Gesture Search to quickly get back to the "last app" I launched. Perhaps by default it should show a list of recently accessed apps, contacts, or documents. This

Lastly, this kind of search facility should be exposed as a Service API to applications, and become an integrated part of the Android OS. This will allow gesture style search to be available in all sorts of applications.

Wrap Up

Gesture Search might be a Google Labs application, but it is still a must have on any Android phone. I seriously can't imagine navigating the 70+ apps and ungodly number of contacts I have without it. I noticed that I have removed lots of shortcuts and started using Gesture Search to launch apps now, which leaves me with more screen space to plop down widgets. It really is a wonderful app. I can't wait to see the graduated product.