If you have gone to google.com on your iPhone recently you have seen a different interface. The iPhone specific site has been optimized for speed and fluidity. When we first got to see this work internally at Google we were all impressed at how Steve Kanefsky was able to make it seem so fast and smooth thanks to lots of caching and smart Ajax work. In fact, the searching itself uses APIs that you can use yourself, the Ajax Search APIs.

This interface is more than just search. Just as the Facebook application is so good due to the fact that Joe tried hard to think about what you would want to do on the phone interface (get info quickly versus browsing around FB endlessly), the same happens here. Core actions across Google are available. A quick look at your email, your calendar, your feeds, and much more.

Here is what Steve said about the project:

We all know that using the web on mobile phones can be a challenge sometimes. Compared to our personal computers, the screens are smaller, it’s more difficult to navigate and enter text, the network connections are slower, and the browsers lack many of the features we’ve become accustomed to. I deal with this every day as both a developer and a user of mobile web applications. So you can imagine how excited I was when the iPhone launched with a large touch screen, Wi-Fi, and a full-blown Safari web browser!

I started thinking about how to use AJAX technology to improve Google on the iPhone. I set out to create an application that would preload my favorite Google products and allow me to switch between them instantly. I wanted web results as well as image, local, and news results without having to repeat my search. I wanted to check Gmail and my news feeds in Google Reader without having to load a new page every time. I also wanted Google Suggest to save me time typing queries on the virtual keyboard.

I created a prototype and showed it to some fellow Googlers. After that, things started moving pretty quickly. A few weeks (and a few gallons of mint tea) later, I had an improved version which Googlers throughout the company were using on their iPhones (it works great on the iPod Touch too). Now we want to share it with everyone.