This takes me back to the olden days of 2003 when I was still rockin’ out with my Palm Pilot.
Google announced Gesture Search late yesterday as a new addition to Google Labs for Android devices running v2.0 and higher. It’s a pretty straightforward app but it has to be open to work. Sort of defeats the purpose if you ask me.
Say you want to call your friend Anne. Just open Gesture Search and draw letter “A”, and Gesture Search returns a list of items that have words starting with “A”. If your handwriting isn’t all that neat, that’s okay. If the “A” you draw looks a bit like an “H”, as seen in the bottom left corner of the screenshot, “H” results will be brought up as well. If needed, you can also erase a query by crossing it horizontally: left to right erases the entire query, and right to left removes the last letter or space in the query. Now you can either scroll down the list to find Anne or write more letters to refine the search.
Additionally, Gesture Search improves search quality by learning from your search history, so Anne’s contact info will jump to the top of the list the next time you write “A”.
It’s available now in the Android Marketplace.
