A few years ago, David Watanabe developed Inquisitor, a Safari web browser plug-in that starts to give you search results while you are still typing your search terms. It was a neat idea to speed up search. Yahoo! acquired the rights to Inquisitor in May of 2008, and the plug-in is now available for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Last year, Watanabe started to work on an iPhone version of Inquisitor, and the free app was released by Yahoo! and finally approved by Apple on March 5, 2009.
I've been playing around with Inquisitor for the last few days, and I'm impressed. On my computer, I never considered Inquisitor to be anything more than a novelty. Sure, it was fast, but it only showed a few search hits. Plus, it doesn't take my very long to type a few search terms, so I have always been happy to wait the very short period of time until after I type and enter my search terms before I see a full Google page with lots of matches.
On the iPhone, on the other hand, things are different. First, I cannot type on the virtual iPhone keyboard as fast as I can type on a real computer keyboard, so an app that starts to give me results before I even finish typing is a great time-saver. Moreover, Inquisitor search results are nicely formatted for the iPhone screen, so it can actually be easier to use than just running a search in the search bar of the iPhone's Safari app.
Here is how the app works along with a few screen shots. Start typing the letters of your search, and you will see a list of possible full search terms come up. Tap as soon as you see the one that you are in the process of typing. This will bring up a screen with news items matching your search term (if any) at the top of the screen, followed by possible web page hits on the rest of the screen:
If you tap on the news items at the top, you will be taken to a page that lists several news stories that relate to your search terms:
If you instead tap on one of the web hits, Inquisitor (which can act as a web browser) will show you the website. But you don't have to wait for the website to fully load to start to get information from that website. While the website is still loading, a box will pop up at the bottom of the screen containing text relevant to your search terms taken from the website. Once the website is fully loaded, the box at the bottom disappears and you will see the full website, just as you would see if you were using Safari:
Using the button at the bottom right of the screen, you can e-mail the website, or you can open the website in the Safari app.
You can adjust a few preferences for Inquisitor by going to the Preferences app on the iPhone. Note that one of the choices is to turn on or off the "Shake to Clear" feature. If you want to quickly erase what is typed in the search bar, just shake the iPhone (just as you might shake an Etch-A-Sketch to clear it) and the search field will clear. It's a cute feature that is actually useful.
Inquisitor works as advertised. It definitely gives me search results faster than I can get using the Safari app. Of course, it is not the only app to have this feature; the Google Mobile App also lets you get search results quickly. While you are typing search terms in the Google Mobile App, boxes appear just below your search history that you can tap to quickly complete words:
Plus, the Google Mobile App includes its signature feature of letting you put your iPhone up to your face and say your search terms out loud, and the app will covert the speech to text and then run the search. I find that speaking search terms with the Google Mobile App is the fastest way for me to run a search. But of course, sometimes you are an environment where you cannot talk out loud to your iPhone, and if you are typing search terms using your fingers, Inquisitor is very fast -- but so is Google Mobile App. The two apps also differ in the layout of the search results. The Google Mobile App shows you a smaller version of what you would get on the Google website, whereas the Inquisitor search results are bigger and look better on the iPhone screen.
Over time, I will be interested to see which app I use more to run searches -- Inquisitor or Google Mobile App. But it is nice to have the choice. Both apps are great, and both are free, so you should download them both and try them out yourself. Either will substantially reduce the time it takes to run a web search on your iPhone.