Gfaster: faster iPhone searching over EDGE

After an idea I had a couple of weeks ago, I cobbled together a little web app for the iPhone that lets you search Google’s cached search results with images stripped out. Gfaster gives you a standard Google search, but adds ‘text-only’ links, allowing you to view a result quickly over EDGE. This can be useful if you’re stranded miles from a Wifi hotspot and wanting to some more serious reading or research over the 2G network. The page will load in a second or two and, although it won’t be very pretty, you get all the text in articles, reviews, forum posts, etc.

The Gfaster search actually works well in practice. The only slight downside I’ve found is that many of the text-only pages are a little wide, resulting in quite small font-sizes on the iPhone, even in landscape orientation.

The app was built using Google’s Ajax Search API, and I had some invaluable help from a couple of the guys at the API Google Group. As usual, I was impressed by the community spirit of people willing to spend time to help each other out.

You can also find Gfaster listed on Apple’s Web App Directory.

For anyone giving this a try on their iPhone, let me know how you find it, and if you have any ideas for improving it. I should probably add pagination at the bottom, so when I get a moment I’ll do that.