On the advice of a friend, I switched my default search engine on my iPhone’s Safari browser from Google to Yahoo!. I must say that I’m impressed. What I like most is that it is properly formatted and designed to be used on a mobile device, and specifically the iPhone. Search results are clear, readable, and formatted for easy clicking. The Google search results page still looks like the desktop version (even though it is a mobile version). That means its a little messy, busy and overall not optimized for mobile searching.

I then realized that I had become so dependent on Google that I never even bothered trying other search engines out in literally years. What I’ve found is that Yahoo! and yes, even Bing, have some nice features that Google lacks. For example, using Bing’s image search doesn’t present you with hundreds of thousands of pages, its just one page that you keep scrolling down. As you scroll more images get loaded up. I don’t know why they didn’t make their text search the same way, as I rather like this idea.

Perhaps Google has been resting on its laurels focusing on many other things than search these days (e.g. Android, Chrome, etc.) and has forgotten that they need to start introducing easier and more efficient ways to do search on their flagship service. I’m sure they’ve improved things on the back-end such as performance, search algorithms, etc. but the interface has been virtually unchanged for ages now and well… its starting to show.

Had to take the Prius in for an oil change and other stuff this morning, so I decided to wait for the car at the local Tim’s while the dealership works on it. Tim’s, just having recently adopted the magical world of credit card purchases, certainly doesn’t have WiFi. Perhaps by the time we’re receiving Internet content directly to our brains, they’ll have installed their first 802.11b router. If we’re lucky.

But no fear - iPhone Internet Tethering is here! And its legit because for once, Rogers did something right and let their users use Internet tethering as opposed to our usually luckier friends to the south on AT&T who have to hack their way into tethering access.

I’ve just connected minutes ago, but I’m quite impressed by the speed. That and I’m connected via Bluetooth. I will be taking notice on the battery life of the iPhone, which I can only imagine will drastically deteriorate at a rapid pace for using 3G and Bluetooth data streaming simultaneously. So far so good though. I’ll also keep an eye on how much data usage actually occurs with normal usage - reading RSS feeds, a couple of papers online, and email.

If both my laptop and iPhone haven’t konked out, I’ll be sure to update this posting with my findings.

Update: After a few hours of tethering, the battery life on the iPhone was down to about a quarter (was at full after starting). Actual data usage was about 4MB received, .2MB sent. I wasn’t doing any heavy browsing. The speed was good. I did have one hiccup where the iPhone seemed to freeze, so I had to do a reset. I did however also place a call while browsing which actually worked flawlessly!