Google Announces Instant Pages, Voice Search, and Image Search

Today, Google announced several new features in its quest to enrich people’s search for information on the Internet.  At its Inside Search event in San Francisco, Google showed off Instant Pages, voice search (on the desktop), and a new kind of image search.  All of which look very cool and innovative.  I think these features will be game changers for the search industry.  And face it.  It has been a while since search was interesting.

Instant Pages, to me, looks the most promising out of all of these features (if I had to pick).  In the past, I’ve written a lot of page speed (loading times) and their importance.  However, Instant Pages can potentially help website owners who can’t afford faster web servers or don’t have the technical know-how to modify server settings, etc make loading their websites a bit more pleasant for everyone.  So what is Instant Pages?

Instant Pages uses an algorithm based on your search query to determine which page(s) you are most likely to click and will pre-render the web page for you before hand.  Therefore making it load super fast when (if) you happen to click on the result.  That’s genius and very clever on Google’s part.  It also effectively eliminates the problem of people leaving websites that take too long to load.

Voice Search on the desktop is essentially the amazing Android technology ported over to the computer.  It harnesses the power of Android’s push to search abilities and allows you to easily search via your voice, of course, provided you have a mic plugged into your computer or your computer has one built-in.  And most computers these days do have microphones.

The new image search feature is also very cool.  Simply drag any image into the Google Images search box and it will search Google’s vast image index to find out what it is and/or where it is.  For example, if you have old family vacation photos taken in front of a particular building, monument, etc and you can’t remember what the name of the structure is you can use this new image search to find out.  It will compare several things within the image using algorithms and match it up with images and results within Google’s indexes.

Google will be rolling out these features throughout this month to their users.  However, if you want to try out these features earlier than that, check out the Google Chrome Dev and Canary builds.