Google Search App for iPad Adds Instant Previews

Google has revamped its Search app for iPads with a bunch of new flashy features to make the app more interactive. The biggest improvement to the app comes from integration of Google Instant results, so you don’t even need to press the search button to get your results.

The redesigned Google Search app for iPad presents you with a simple home screen with a large search field for you to type your query. You can also search by using voice commands or Goggles, which allows you to search for items by taking photos of them with the iPad camera. You can also Google’s main services from the home screen, such as Gmail, Calendar, News or Maps.

Once you enter your search term, results will start to display instantly as you type, so there’s no need to press the search button altogether. Google has worked a lot on refining the results browsing experience. For regular search results, you can switch to instant preview mode, where you are presented with a series of sliding page snapshots from the top results of your query.

When you tap on a result, the snapshot fades in to the foreground and the page starts loading in a panel that slides from the right. The browsing panel allows you to share the current page via e-mail or open it in Safari, or +1 a result directly. To close the result panel, you just slide it to the right, where it stays pinned at the edge (so you can pull it back by dragging the edge of the panel to the left).

The image results browser has been redesigned, too. When you tap on the first image result, you are presented with a carousel (similar to iTunes CoverFlow) of images that you browse by swiping left or right. Tapping on an image then opens in a viewer panel the page containing the respective image.

If you sign in with your Google ID into the Search app for iPad, you can also browse your search history visually. You can swipe right to view snapshots of pages you visited, which are stacked and organized by search term (and delete the queries you’d rather not have in there).

Here’s a video from Google demoing the new Search app for iPad:

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