Google pulls out tricks to simplify search

Google

Elena Vnorovscaia/ Chişinău / Moldova.ORG/ -- Google is introducing more technological tricks to make internet searching easier and faster and to give people another reason to surf the web on its Chrome browser.

The features include an option that will allow people to speak their search requests in English while sitting in front of their office and home computers. It's something they can already do on smartphones running on Google Inc.'s Android software.

Voice search will work on computers next week, states the company's blog. The first time will be recognized only queries in English. To enter a voice query, you must click on the icon of a microphone next to the search string. Feature will be available in the Chrome browser from version 11.

The new features serve as another reminder that search remains Google's backbone.

By continually coming up with new ways to simplify search requests, Google hopes to extend its dominance in what so far has been internet's most popular and demanded market. For now, the spoken-request option for desktop computers will be offered only on Google's Chrome browser. Google hopes to eventually make all the features available through Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox browsers, both which have wider audiences than Chrome.

As soon as it will be possible to establish the necessary setups people will be able to speak requests in other languages, too.

The speech-recognition technology draws upon a database of more than 230 billion words that Google has built while processing spoken requests on phones for the past two and a half years.

The Chrome laptops from Acer Inc. and Samsung Electronics will cost $349 US to $499 and require internet connections to run most programs because they will have limited storage capacity, not hard drives.

New photo tool

Another new featured search engine, which the company announced on Inside Search, became a "Visual Search" (Search by Image). And this tool does not need the Chrome browser. The new tool will allow users to drag images into Google's search results to get a list of results about what's in the photograph. For instance, a photo from a family vacation years ago could be dragged into the search box to get information about the location.
Also "Visual Search" will help determine which artist painted a particular picture, or what place the picture, said Google in his blog.

This image-recognition technology can identify people, but Google so far has decided not to use it for that purpose. Google executives also said the photos entered into the search box won't be made available to the general public.

The new photo tool "Visual search" Google will launch in the coming days. As is the case with voice search, a function first appeared on mobile devices as part of the application Google Goggles.

In its turn, Microsoft's Bing search engine has been getting more usage during the past two years, but it hasn't been able to reverse the huge losses in Microsoft's online division.

Although Google appears well entrenched as the internet search leader, it has struggled to counter the threat posed by the success of Facebook. Its popularity poses a problem for Google because most of its content can't be indexed by Google's search engine.

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