Anyone who does a lot of Web browsing and searching on an iPhone or iPod Touch knows that results can be a pain to read in the native Safari browser. Mobile sites aren’t always easy to find, while desktop sites often require a lot of pinching and pulling. The free Taptu Touch Search iPhone app aims to ease your searching pain with what it calls “touch-friendly Web.” Although Taptu functions like a normal search engine, its emphasis is on finding iPhone-friendly sites that are easy to read and display optimally on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Taptu Touch Search has one of the best interfaces I’ve seen in an iPhone app. By tapping Taptu’s squid-like logo that appears in the iPhone app’s upper right corner, users can enable search-narrowing filters search as iPhone Sites, Apps & Games, Blogs, Twitter, Images and News & Sports. Below the standard filters, you’ll also see suggested searches related to your initial query, much like Google’s smart search. However, when performing a search, I haven’t been as impressed with the actual results unless I am using one of Taptu’s built-in filters, but I do expect this to improve over time.
Results are displayed as thumbnail previews, and you can flick through them like in the iPod’s Cover Flow. Tap the blue arrow to launch the page in Taptu’s inline browser. Tapping the information “I” button shows you the page’s link, and offers options for saving or sharing through email, Twitter or Facebook.
Taptu is free, so it’s worth checking out just for its extremely user-friendly interface. You can also search for other iPhone apps within the program—and the information included is often better than what you’ll find in the iTunes App Store itself.
