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Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Google announces host of search improvements | The Digital Home - CNET News

Google announces host of search improvements | The Digital Home - CNET News: To do so, it unveiled voice search. Users will find a microphone icon when accessing Google search from their Chrome browser, allowing them to speak a query. The service was previously only available in the company's mobile search.

Google has also added a new Search By Image feature to its Images search that delivers results based on a photo. Users can drag-and-drop an image into the search box, or instead choose to upload it or copy and paste it into the field. Chrome extensions are also available to help users search by an image.

Dubbed Instant Pages, the offering instantly renders a destination page. According to Google, users currently need to wait 5 seconds to get to a destination page from its search service. With Instant Pages in place, they won't need to wait at all. In one example, Google said that The Washington Post's homepage loaded in 3.2 seconds without help from Instant Pages, and took 0.0 seconds to load with the new feature's help.

Like Google's other Web search improvements, Instant Pages will only be available to Chrome users for now. The company will be making the new feature available this week in Chrome beta.