Google on Thursday launched its latest mobile search effort that links users to sites that have been designed specially for smaller screens.

To enable such a feature, Google has crawled the Web for pages built using XHTML and compiled a separate index from its standard search engine.

To access results of pages formatted for mobile devices such as phones and PDAs, users simply type in a search query and choose Mobile Web (beta) as the search option. AOL launched a similar feature in April, which automatically adapts Web pages to the dimensions of small mobile screens.

Google previously offered a number of mobile search capabilities, including local and image searches, and Google SMS - a service that uses text messaging to relay answers.

"Your phone can now be that much more useful," added Schirripa.