Eliminating the barriers that stand between users and information is an endless goal for Google. The company continues to revolutionize the way users search the internet and strives to provide only the most relevant and superior content possible. On Tuesday June 14, 2011, Google held a media event in San Francisco to announce their new features that they hope will drastically change how users will search the internet. Among the features that were announced were Instant Pages, Search by Image, and Voice Search.
from http://www.google.com/insidesearch/voicesearch.html, June 2011
At the event Google also shared their latest search statistics. The stats showed that mobile search is following the same usage pattern as the early years of Google desktop search. Within the past couple years mobile searching has grown tremendously and with technology like voice recognition, mobile searching is expected to grow even more. Google believes that voice recognition is a technology that shouldn’t be limited to the mobile experience and that is why Voice Search is now available on a desktop. Their voice recognition is currently comprised of over 230 billion words or phrases and each day their system captures over 2 years’ worth of voice searches.
Voice search allows users to effortlessly speak what they are looking for and Google will find it, searching doesn’t get any easier than that. Voice search also helps out when users need to perform searches that are longer, more complex or harder to spell. Google Chrome 11 or higher and a microphone are required to use Google Voice Search. From there, voice searching is as easy as clicking on the small microphone button located by the search bar and speaking your search terms.
Another feature that first staked its ground on mobile devices was Google Goggles. Google Goggles allows users to search by snapping a picture with their mobile device. Google search now lets users search places, art, and animals using images on desktop computers. When on the Google Image Page, a user can search with an image by clicking on the small camera icon that is located next to the voice search microphone. They can then drag and drop an image, upload an image from their computer, or plug an image URL. Users can also download the Firefox extension or a Google Chrome Extension to provide quick right-click image searches.
Another feature that was announced was Google Instant Pages, not to be confused with Google Instant which was introduced last year and can take whatever the user is searching and produce prediction results for a quick selection process. The new Instant Pages further increase the search speed by pre-rendering the top search results. Instant Pages gets your result ready in the background so they open and are loaded instantly. With “relevancy technology” Google knows to only pre-render a result when it is sure that the user will open it. Google Instant and Instant Page can save anywhere from 2-10 seconds of the time it takes to locate search results and the time it takes to open those results. Instant Pages will be available soon with the next Beta release of Google Chrome.
These new search facets enable users to search, sift through, and view results quicker than ever before. As Google develops more and more features it becomes abundantly clear that their top priority is to create the best possible search experience with the most relevant results.
Try out these features today and let us know what you think. To learn more about these new features visit Google Inside Search and the Google Blog
Thanks for reading!
Dustin
Tags: Chrome, Google, Google Chrome, Mobile, search, Search Results, voice recognition, voice search
