Google Is Getting Very Good at Understanding What Mobile Users Do and Don't Want

This column originally appeared on March 21 on Real Money, our premium site for active traders. Click here to get great columns like this.

If there's anything that Google Search was known for from its very beginning -- well, besides providing more useful and relevant results than Yahoo! (YHOO) , Excite, Alta Vista and all other would-be rivals -- it has been the service's simplicity. While rival search engines tried to double as "portals" chock-filled with news, sports, weather and other content, Alphabet/Google (GOOGL) remained focused on providing a fast, reliable and effective search engine, with even its ads limited to text and (eventually) small images guaranteed not to seriously distract from its core service.

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And while Google launched a slew of complementary services, it refrained from integrating their content with Google Search except to the extent that doing so would enhance the quality of its search results. To this day, Google's PC search home page remains a textbook example of minimalist web design.

All of this makes the new features Google just announced for its mobile search apps and website, as well as some of the feature additions that preceded them, especially jarring. However, this sudden willingness to embrace the kind of "feature-rich" design embraced by Google's former rivals has everything to do with how different wants and needs are on smartphones compared with PCs. And the same certainly holds for Google's new attempts to un-clutter its mobile operating system.