Google on Tuesday lifted the curtain on several new features it's adding to its search technology, including voice and search by image for the desktop, and Instant Pages, which loads Web pages selected by searchers virtually instantly.The company's Inside Search event in San Francisco was punctuated by demos showing how Google is bringing successful mobile device search features to mainstream desktop and notebook PCs and saving users time in their searches by shaving precious seconds from the point of query through the selection of results to the actual loading of a selected page.
"Every time you are missing a fact or a piece of information, your train of thought is derailed," said Google Fellow Amit Singhal in introducing several new search technologies. "With search, we strive to make sure there are no derailments in your train of thought. Search is all about removing these barriers between you and the knowledge you seek."
The most novel piece of news Monday was the introduction of Google's Instant Pages, which combines with Auto-Predict and Google Instant in searches to get users to their Web destinations faster than ever before.
Auto-Predict kicks in during a search's query stage, guessing more quickly than a user types what combination of words they are searching. Google Instant takes that data and begins churning the evolving query through Google's search algorithm to produce a list of results much faster than was possible when users had to hit the "Google Search" button to kick-start the algorithm.
Those two improvements are old hat, however. What the new Instant Pages technology does is take the ball from Auto-Correct and Google Instant on the query and results side of thing and carry it over the finish line—to the searcher's final destination, a fully loaded Web page.
How does Google make Web pages it has no control over load faster on Internet connections it doesn't manage? By using the same technique with Instant Pages that it already deploys via Google Instant. Which is to say, Instant Pages is busy loading pages in the background even while a user is searching for them, courtesy of the company's predictive algorithms. More
