Cake

TAKING A SLICE OUT OF GOOGLE. Free | cakebrowser.com

Search engines on mobile are broken, according to the Cake development team. Their main problem is that they’re simply not fast enough, or geared towards giving you results expediently. Rather than presenting a dull list that relies purely on text, Cake preloads the top results and lets you scroll through them, the page loaded and ready to go. You can pre-filter the results based on video, images, a simple web search, news or ecommerce if you want to buy the thing you’re looking for. It’s an appealing concept — searches done quickly — and the interface is lovely, clean and simple.

Having the subsequent results at the top of the page, ready to scroll through, is a nice touch. However, Cake’s concept does raise a few questions, like how it searches and organises the results, and it’s completely reductive, taking the idea that a search term needs to be on the first page of Google, and ‘above the fold’, to ‘this is what you get’.

Choice can be overwhelming, sure, but a narrower focus seems dangerous. An Android version is coming soon.