Posted by Rob Stacey, Software Engineer and Steve Cheng, Product Manager

Two weeks ago we updated our mobile homepage in the US so that it would load more quickly. Today, were releasing in the US a number of improvements to our mobile search results pages for BlackBerry browsers. These new improvements are designed to help you find the information you want more easily.

• Improved comprehensiveness: Our mobile search now incorporates results from Product Search, Blog Search, News archives search, and more.
• Blended results: Instead of showing you web, image, local and news results in separate sections, we now combine them to improve relevance. Weve also made it easier for you to focus your search on any one of these categories -- notice how the links are now placed at the top of the results page.
• Longer snippets: Web results include longer snippets so that your answer may be right on the results page.
• Related searches: At the bottom of the search results page, youll find a list of related searches to help you refine a query.

You may notice that many of these improvements mirror our desktop search capabilities. We have taken desktop elements that have tested well on mobile and further optimized them for the mobile use case. Improving mobile search is a continuous process and we hope you find the releases this past month to move the needle on what we care most about: quality, speed and ease of use.

To watch a demo of our new mobile search results pages, take a peek at the video below. Or better yet, test drive our new search results page yourself. Its simple. Go to google.com on your BlackBerry browser and search away!

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Google and Oracle have been tied up in a fight for a while over how Java works in the Android operating system. In 2012, Oracle specifically targeted the Dalvik virtual machine that runs on Android devices in its legal assault against Google, though Google eventually prevailed in that case. Google has been working toward replacing Dalvik in secret and users running Android 4.4 will be able to use Google’s new alternative.

Android 4.4 will reportedly allow users to select which runtime they use. The available options will be Dalvik and Google’s new runtime called ART. Google has stated on its website for developers that ART is a work in progress and is considered experimental at this time. Users wanting to give it a try can enable the new runtime in Android 4.4 via the Settings, Developer Options menu.

Indications are that users won’t notice much difference between the two available runtimes for now. ART is said to handle app execution in a fundamentally different way than Dalvik. While Dalvik uses a Just-In-Time compiler and a lot of the compiling is actually done on the user’s device each time the app is run, ART is different.

ART precompiles bytecode into machine language when the apps are first installed turning them into native applications. The process is called Ahead-Of-Time compilation. This means that start times for applications can be cut down significantly and execution can be faster compared to using Dalvik. Indications are that Google has been working on ART the last two years. No timeframe for ART to replace Dalvik has been announced. SlashGear

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