iPhone browsing over EDGE with images turned off

Generally, browsing the web on the iPhone over EDGE is slow, especially if you are loading pages with lots of graphics. What a shame, then, that there is no option available on the mobile version of Safari to turn off images. This would be especially useful for those times when you need to do some proper research when out and about. Could there be a solution to this, using Google’s Search API

Last weekend I was in Bristol trying to buy a PS3 game as a present for my brother-in-law. Since I know almost nothing about video games, for each game I saw in the shop I used my iPhone to read through a bunch of reviews. But game review sites tend to have a lot of graphics on them, and loading each page over the EDGE network was painfully slow. It was taking me ages to load each page before I could read the review.

Then I realised that Google has a cached version of each search result and that there is a link at the top of each cached page allowing you to load a text-only version. For the research I was doing, I didn’t matter whether that the results were pages cached from a few days ago: the reviews available would be largely the same.

This started me thinking. It turns out that you can get directly to the cached, text-only version of any page by using the cache keyword and the strip setting on a Google search URL. So for example:

http://google.com/search?q=cache:jackfruitdesign.com&strip=1

Gives you the cached, text-only version of my company homepage. But this doesn’t help much with my iPhone browsing, because it requires typing in each URL via the keyboard.

However, looking at the Google AJAX Search API, it turns out that each search result has a link to its cached version (obviously) and that it should be possible to simply add the strip=1 setting to the end of that URL. So it is feasible to create my own search page that uses the Google Search API, and use it to browse search results with images turned off, thus saving a lot of time over EDGE.

The Terms of Use for the API seem to be a bit restrictive when it comes to making any modifications of the results themselves, so legally this could be a slightly grey area. But this use does seem to be within the spirit of the Google Search API, so I can’t see there being too much of a problem. Seems like a nice project for a rainy day.