Mobilicio.usbeta

How We Use Google Mobile

April 13th, 2006 by Jason Coleman

We’ve recently received an inquiry into how we use Google’s Mobile Search to transcode (or mobilize) our bookmarks. I’d like to tell you that there is some complicated API that we had to figure out, but it’s really not as interesting as that.If you do a search at Google Mobile and follow the link for one of the results, you should see an URL like the following in your browser’s address field:

http://www.google.com/gwt/n?q=investor+geeks&site=search&hl=en
&lr=&mrestrict=xhtml&ct=res&cd=1&rd=1&u=www.investorgeeks.com/

It turns out that Google is using the “get” method pass parameters around in their search. This isn’t too surprising. Google’s flagship web search does things the same way. Encoding the query in the URL makes it easier to bookmark search results pages.

Now you’ll see a lot of information in the URL above: original query, type of search, language, and some other stuff that I wouldn’t even guess a meaning for. The one parameter we are interested in however is the “u” value (supposedly for URL).  It turns out that this is the only necessary parameter to view a transcoded version of a page. For instance, I could write:

http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=www.investorgeeks.com

So we’re not doing anything too special, just appending “http://www.google.com/?u” to the front of the link in your bookmarks. You used to be able to see this on our sire by hovering over a link and checking the URL in the status bar. However, these days you’ll see something like:

http://mobilicio.us/linkout.php?link=138049

We’re sending you through this file first instead of linking to the Google Mobile URL directly to prepare for the day when we offer multiple transcoding methods. We are also tracking how often you use a particular link, which is the basis for some interesting features we are planning on releasing soon.

I hope this has helped to explain a bit about how Mobilicio.us works. Happy browsing.

| April 13th, 2006 | by Jason Coleman