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Cake Web Browser ditches search results, and it kinda works
- Cake Web Browser is a new mobile browser app with a unique take on mobile browsing.
- When making a query, the app will load up what it deems to be the most relevant page, rather than search results.
- You can then swipe through other websites as if they were pictures in a gallery.
The Cake Web Browser app has just been released in the Google Play Store. It’s the product of a startup called Cake, founded in 2016, and presents a whole new take on the mobile web browsing experience.
When you enter a search query, instead of displaying the regular search results page, Cake will load up what it determines to be the most relevant website. You’ll then be able to swipe through a carousel of other, related pages if the first doesn’t suit your needs.
For example, if I search “Chestnuts”, Cake Web Browser will take me to a high-ranking webpage about how to cook them. Likewise, searching “Spider-Man” takes me directly to the character profile from the official Marvel website, skipping the Wikipedia and the IMDB entries (the top two results when I search in Chrome).
It has similar features for images, videos, and shopping too. Say you want to see images of a baseball bat, Cake will let you swipe through results from Google Images, Imgur, Flickr etc. There’s a built-in ad-blocker and an incognito mode included too, as well as a traditional search results page (when you swipe left instead of right) just in case. Check out some other features in the awkward video below.
Cake Browser presents an interesting idea, but there are some hurdles it will have to overcome if it’s to be widely adopted. For it to be really useful, the app must be able to consistently predict why you have searched for a certain word or phrase. Though the Spider-Man Marvel profile was a good fit for my needs, it may not be for someone else, and swiping through multiple websites to get where you want to be is going to be more frustrating than simply looking through the results in a search list.
The second hurdle—which goes some way to revealing why this side-by-side comparison video isn’t happening in real-time—is because the browser is slower to bring up the first results compared to other mobile browsers. This probably has a lot to do with it loading a web page, with its resources, rather than the typical index page, but you’ll notice it nonetheless. The browser is also buggy and I experienced a number of quirks in my brief time playing with it.
But it’s early days for the browser, and I can’t deny there’s something intriguing about it. At the time of writing, it’s sitting in Google Play with an average rating of 3.4 stars, with the many of the comments indicating that it’s a good concept that needs work. And that’s where I stand too.
Cake was officially launched in Google Play this week and you can download it from the link below.