In a media event in San Francisco, Amit Singhal Head of Google’s core ranking team announced a range of new updates for Desktop search, Mobile search and Google Instant.
Perhaps taking a cue from the negative feedback Facebook received on enabling face recognition Google has clarified that the search by image feature would not have facial recognition.
Voice Search on Desktop
A feature that had already been available on mobile devices is now finally available on the desktop, it is now possible to search by voice. This was not entirely surprising since Google had already demonstrated at I/O that by simply adding one line of code, a text field in Chrome couldaccept voice input. Right now it works only on the latest version of Chrome, and would be available on other browsers when they implement the HTML5 speech input API. The problem with most voice recognition services is that they are designed keeping the American accents in mind, however Google’s voice recognition technology has no problem in recognizing Indian accents. Check out this video.
Image Queries
Like Voice search, search by image was already present on smartphones through Google Goggles. Now this service is available on Google Image search where modern browser users can just drag and drop images in the search field to get further details about the image or even similar images. An alternative way of providing Google the image to be searched for is via URL, uploading an image or right clicking an image on the browser. This is Liz Gannes’ (All Things D) commentary of the Image search demo at the event:
Next demo is of a blurry image of a guy standing on a trail in front of an island in Greece. You can now drag an image from your desktop into the search query box. This returns the name of the island: Nea Kameni. (Whoa, kinda crazy!)
Perhaps taking a cue from the negative feedback Facebook received on enabling face recognition Google has clarified that the search by image feature would not have facial recognition.
Instant Pages
Continuing its obsession with speed, Google introduced Instant Pages which would pre fetch and render pages which are more likely to be clicked in search results in the background. This along with Google Instant would save around three to five seconds of the user’s time on typical searches. Instant pages is available today to those who use developer builds of Chrome and would soon be available to beta users as well. Click here to learn more.
Mobile Search
Two of the three main announcements at this event were bringing something already available on mobile to desktop. This highlights the importance Google gives to mobile search. Mobile search in many ways right now mimics the initial stages of desktop search. Google made quite a few enhancements to its mobile search offering as well, the highlight being local search. Google added features that were already available on Google places to the Google homepage. With this searching nearby places becomes much more faster and easier. When searching for places a map will overlay the results at all times, even when scrolling so that placing coffee shops and ATMs on maps is hassle free.
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