Please note that I could see Google Suggest working at www.google.com and not at www.google.co.in (as of this writing). May be it will come to the latter a little later.

If you are browsing from India and you type in www.google.com you are redirected to www.google.co.in. To go to www.google.com click on the link “Go to Google.com” (found on the bottom right, below the search text box).

Once you are at google.com, try typing “open s” technology and you would get suggestions like “open source”, “open source software”, “open suse” etc. along with the number of Google search results these keywords may yield. Saves you from typing and misspells!

Google Suggest gives a type ahead suggestion for known (or well known keywords) along with the search results. That is, typing in shekhar Suggests “shekhar kapur” (famous movie director), “shekhar suman” (TV celebrity) and others but does not Suggest “shekhar govindarajan” (grrrrrr).

Google Suggest (though not at google.co.in) is live @:

• www.google.co.jp
• www.google.fr

Other titbits

• As of this writing. Google Suggest is also not implemented at http://www.google.com.pk/ (Google Pakistan). Its not available for Google Australia and Google UK too, so definitely not a third world treatment.
• The Google Suggest only works on the first page (e.g. www.google.com). When you search again using the search box on search results page, its the same old, “non type-ahead typing-in”. I wonder why?  I’m used to firing a completely different search/keywords based on the results fetched from the first (or subsequent) searches. Perhaps, a type ahead search could be nuisance if implemented across? But let the user decide this via options/preferences (see below)
• Noticed a new option named “Query Suggestions” in Preferences (link on the right side to the search box). This can be used to turn the Google Suggest on or off. But this again works only for the first page (as said above).

Following were the depicted (graphically) scores for the home page (http://www.shekhargovindarajan.com) of this Blog (click to see the full graph):

• The score was 2.45 out of 5
• 2.45 was rounded off to “3″ as “Overall” score by Ready.mobi
• Just for information: www.google.com scored 5/5!
• Just for information: www.yahoo.com scored 4/5

I’m happy with:

1. The reported download size of the homepage (4.8k)
2. The reported download speed on an Edge connection (about 1.2 seconds)

Note:

1. Ready.mobi works with WordPress plugins (and should work with other such plugins) which detect a mobile device (or mobile browser) and redirect it to the mobile friendly version/site.
2. If you are using caching, then you may first like to hit (or browse) the Website page. This will build the cache, in case the page is not visited for a while. And then perform the Ready.mobi test. The speed at which the page loads contributes to the overall score.
3. To checkout your Website on the mobile emulators (on the Page Results) you will need Sun Java Plugin
4. Mobile website developers or webmasters should check out http://dev.mobi/content/dotmobi-mobile-web-developers-guide.
5. You may have noticed on the home page of Ready.mobi, it also offers entire site check (instead of checking page by page). The site check requires registration. Havn’t checked this out yet.

I’m not happy with the overall score (despite, specifically, using a Mobile Plugin for this Blog). If you scroll down the Ready.mobi’s “Page results” page, it will tell you the tests which have failed. I found the following tests failing for the hompage of this site:

1. XHTML Mobile Profile
2. Valid Markup
3. Structure

Clicking on the failed tests, explains it further and also gives a link to “Help me fix it”. Therefore the next step for me is – to try to fix these mobile unfriendly errors. Will update this Blog post as I proceed. Subsequently will run this Blog through the entire site check of Ready.mobi.

In the meanwhile, please share your scores and fixes via comments.

Update:

AND THE HOME PAGE NOW SCORES 5 out of 5!!!

todo: testing on mobile after the changes, how I did it, possible contribution back to WordPress!

Update (May 30, 2009): After updating the WordPress Mobile Edition Plugin to 3.0.4 (refer to Browse this blog on a Mobile), I get a score of 5 out of 5. That is, no modifications required to get a 5/5 score at ready.mobi if you are using the latest version of the plugin.