Google is taking search to the next level, introducing new real-time search capabilities the company said add breaking news and other up-to-the-minute information to search results. Google is also adding the ability to search using images, instead of key words, using a new search technology it calls "Google Goggles."
The announcements were made Monday in an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., near Google's headquarters.
The new real-time capabilities add a "dynamic stream of content from across the Web," according to a Google blog post by Google Fellow Amit Singhal, who introduced the new features at the museum. Immediately after conducting a search, a user can see live updates to the search from sites such as Twitter and FriendFeed, headlines from news sites, and blog posts.
Searching on something like "climate change," for example, and then clicking on "latest results" will add new items that have just been posted to the Web. Along with desktop devices the new feature will be available for iPhones and Android devices. Also, a new "Hot Topics" feature added to Google Trends displays the most common topics people are publishing to the Web in real-time.
Singhal said the new real-time capability is based on "a dozen new search technologies" and algorithms that let Google monitor more than a billion documents and process millions of real-time changes each day.
On the mobile side, users can search using voice, location and sight using a mobile device. At the event at the museum Google execs demonstrated Google Goggles that lets users search for objects using images, rather than words, through a mobile phone camera.
