Examining Universal Search, finding companies and Twitter

So, Mr. InvisibleMan over at PalmPreForums.org is have way to much fun with his illegitimately-obtained Palm Pre emulator. And we’re fine with that, because as long as he’s having fun with it, we’re learning more about the Pre without actually having any to, you know, use. And the videos just keep coming. This time he’s hit up the much-touted Universal Search feature of webOS and discovered a few interesting things.

Twitter has been added to Universal Search, or at least that’s what the big Twitter button in the Universal Search window is telling me. Also, while we know that you can start off searching for an application or contact and can move on to a web search. But when you have an application or contact that matches what you’re searching for (say, I have President Obama’s contact info in my phone and want to see his Wikipedia page), all I have to do is hit the “Find…” bar and it will forcibly give me the web search options (Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia, and now Twitter).

Since it appears that the contacts application does not have the ability to categorize your contacts, we’re going to be in need of a way to narrow things down. If you have company information added into your contacts (President, United States of America for my Obama contact) you can search for that company and get all contacts that match that company. Carrying over from the old Palm OS Contacts application is the ability to search by initials - first name followed by last name (typing “boba” will bring up Barack Obama and Barry Obando).

Lastly, we get a look at how search works in other applications. In Memos searching will dig through the content of your notes, and in Messaging it will search by contact name. Unfortunately, these search capabilities are not integrated into the from-the-launcher Universal Search, but chances are if you’re doing a search, you will at least know in which application you intend to look.