Building on the mobile mapping capabilities that Google rolled out last November, the search giant is launching a new location-awareness capability called Search with My Location.

Previously, when a Windows Mobile handset user went to Google.com from the phone’s browser for a local search, the results were tailored to the last location entered, noted Google software engineers Terry Van Belle and Tim Cox in a new blog.

Google’s newly introduced mobile-search technology, which is powered by a new Gears Geolocation API, “makes searching for nearby businesses on Windows Mobile phones both faster and easier,” the members of Google’s mobile team wrote.

Cell-ID Broadcasts

Google’s API relies on a number of location sources to estimate the user’s position. For example, the technology can take cell-ID broadcasts from multiple cellular towers and sift them through Google-developed algorithms to approximate a user’s current location.

“Now, using the Gears Geolocation API, Search with My Location approximates your actual

location using the same cell-ID technology used by Google maps for mobile,” Van Belle and Cox explained. “So whether you want to find sushi nearby, just type ’sushi’ and Google will return local business listings around you.”

The new API plus has the ability to access the GPS chips embedded in location-aware handsets. As a percentage of total sales, GPS-enabled devices only accounted for 13.7 percent of the handset market in 2007, noted Gartner Research Director Carolina Milanesi. However, GPS-handset penetration is expected to rise to 18 percent that year and reach the 43 percent mark by 2011, Milanesi said, citing a Gartner report from October 2007.

Google says estimates based on cell-tower knowledge are calculated much faster than those based on GPS. And unlike GPS, the technology “works reliably indoors and doesn’t drain your phone battery at the rate that GPS does,” noted Google software engineer Mike Chu in a…

Original post by dhiram