Google now allows you to 'search' without internet

Google on Wednesday said that it will allow smartphone users to "search" for something even when there is no internet connection in the phone. Now of course, there is a catch here. Google, irrespective of its brilliant engineers, cannot defeat the laws of physics and return the search results from the web when there is no data connection in a smartphone. Just that now the Google app will now won't tell offline users that it can't complete the search. Instead, it will queue up the search query and complete the search when the phone connects to internet.

"Mobile networks can sometimes be inconsistent or spotty, which means that even if you have a connection when you start your search, it might fail before you get your results back," Google's Shekhar Sharad wrote on the company blog.

"With this change, search results are saved as soon as they are retrieved, even if you lose connection afterwards or go into airplane mode. So the next time you lose service, feel free to queue up your searches, put your phone away and carry on with your day. The Google app will work behind-the-scenes to detect when a connection is available again and deliver your search results once completed," he said.

Although this is not any solution to the internet connectivity issues that people face, particularly in countries in India, it just makes it slightly more convenient to use the Google Search on smartphones.

For now the feature is available only on Google Search app for Android. To get this feature, all that users have to do is update the app on their phone by going into the Play Store.

Of late, Google that is among the world's biggest web companies, is focusing a lot on improving the offline features in its app. Earlier, the company hoped to improve the offline capabilities of YouTube by allowing consumers to download the videos temporarily. The company's CEO Sundar Pichai had said this offline YouTube feature was specifically created keeping Indian users in mind. But then proved so useful and popular that the company also rolled it out in other regions.

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