Yesterday Google held a media event Google’s Inside Search in San Francisco where new web search features were discussed, the official Google blog says.
New Instant Pages technology is based on Google Instant, introduced in September 2010, which produces a page of search results before the user has finished typing their query or pressed the entry key. The new feature will predict which page users will choose from a list of search results and begin loading its data—even before they have clicked on the link.
Instant Pages uses the users’ Google search history together with the relevance of each search result, and around 200 other algorithmic factors, to determine which link they are most likely to click on, and begins contacting the server to load that page in the background as soon as the search results appear. That’s the way users spare time, as normally people spend 9 seconds entering a query and 15 seconds sifting through results, while Google’s processing between the two only takes 1 second.
«We’re obsessed with speed,» said Google fellow and search scientist Amit Singhal. «We call speed the killer app. None of us have enough time, and last year’s Google Instant was one of the biggest improvements we’ve made in getting information to users quicker.»
Another point of discussion was Google’s voice search, which currently allows mobile phone users to speak their search query. Now the feature will be extended to desktop searches and will be available for Chrome and Firefox users later this week, via a small microphone symbol beside the Google search box. Initially the feature will be in English only, but other languages will be added later.
The image search feature will also improve as users will be invited to upload, drag and drop, paste a URL or use a browser extension to provide a reference to an image. Google will then identify the image by comparing it to its database and publishing the subject, location and details.
In May Google conducted a social Chrome ad-campaign ‘the Web is what you make of it’.