Google announced a bunch of new features at Inside Search press conference, June 14th, 2011, which took place yesterday. The new additions are voice search on desktop computers, Instant Search and Image Search.
Voice Search on the desktop
Google Voice Search has been available in phones for years. Both Android handset and iPhone via Google’s search app have that feature for a long time, and now the same capability is brought to the desktop and initially, to the Chrome.
Search by Image
With this feature you can now upload images straight to the search engine and Google will search through the image file and attempt to locate any similar images and return you the terms they’re associated with:
If you click the camera, you can upload any picture or plug in an image URL from the web and ask Google to figure out what it is. Try it out when digging through old vacation photos and trying to identify landmarks
Google has released an extension for Chrome and Firefox that lets users identify any picture on the web by simply right-clicking.
Instant Pages
Google is bringing Instant Pages to Google Chrome. Available in all of the beta and dev versions of Google Chrome, Instant Pages is Google’s answer to the pre-fetching features built in to Mozilla’s Firefox. Instead of simply scraping basic HTML information ahead of time, however, Google says that their pre-rendering will grab other resources as well such as Javascript for snappy page loading. Instant Pages are only being used for search results (not targeted for ads specifically), but Google did mention they’ll be looking at how to best deliver ads to consumers in the future. Instant Pages allow the most common results to load instantly (in virtually zero seconds) when the user decides to load them:
Google pointed out that mobile searches on its site have grown and now surpassed desktop searches.
[via Google’s Blog]