Google mobile proxy : Mobile internet through Google

The google proxy wil convert any internet page to a XHTML version and resize for your mobile phone.

You can check it here : http://www.google.com/gwt/n 

Google is using this proxy to display all sites you access from your mobile using google.com

More talk about it here (my previous entry) and here

Google Mobile search is quite smart

I was thinking the other day how nice it would be to be able to access any internet site with your mobile phone, using the exact same URL you use on your PC browser, not a dedicated WAP page. The idea would have involved a proxy (basically a box between your phone and the web site) to transform the web site content adequately to each phone based on the phone user agent (the identification of the phone model). By proxying the request made by the phone, we would be able to check the user agent against a user agent library like WURFL to determine its display capabilities, either WML or XHTML as well as its screen size in order to eventually resize the text and the images. With this information we would have then been ale to return to the phone a WML or an XHTML page instead of the classical HTML (not really XHTML compliant) used by most web pages at the moment.

So this proxy would transform HTML to XHTML or HTML to WML based on the phone characteristics. The operators could have used it to allow their subscribers to access all internet web pages without any phone/plan upgrade. This proxy could have also been used by large traffic web sites like yahoo.com, Microsoft.com… to allow mobile users to access their site.
So the first thing to do was of course to check the newly released Google mobile search in order to see what solution they implemented. I imagined they would have simply put a special WML page and XHTML page accessible for the phones. You would enter the traditional http://www.google.com in your mobile phone browser and would be directed to either the specific http://www.google.com/wml or http://www.google.com/xhtml page based on your phone user agent. Pretty simple.
You would then be stuck I thought (I didn’t think very far obviously) when you click on a search result. You would be directed to the html site which your phone browser would not be able to read.
Well not at all , Google is actually proxying ALL the pages you access from their search results. Which means any site will be converted to either WML or XHTML so that you can access the page on your phone, how nice is that?

For example, let’s try to search for Microsoft on http://www.google.com/xhtml using Microsoft Mobile Explorer:

Everything is fine so far, the URL is http://www.google.com/xhtml?q=microsoft&hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&btnG=Search&site=search&mrestrict=xhtml which is what we expected. The search results are displayed in xhtml as they should, But what happens we click on the first link? Do we go to the Microsoft.com site? Well yes… and no… You actually go to a Google generated page of the Microsoft.com web page. Look at the URL after clicking on the link : http://www.google.com/gwt/n?q=microsoft&site=search&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&mrestrict=xhtml&ct=res&cd=1&rd=1&u=www.microsoft.com/ Yes, you are still on a Google page ! and the Microsoft site is displayed properly in the XHTML your phone wants:

This is literally “The web viewed by Google”. Too bad for the proxy idea though, Google is already very well on it.

Technorati tags : mobile google search google mobile