Google Speeds Search With 'Instant Pages,' Desktop Voice Queries

In Google's view, the process of finding information online is rife with inefficiencies. According to Google Fellow Amit Singhal, entering a search query takes an average of nine seconds, while users take an average of 15 seconds to pick a result. Once that happens, it takes an average of five seconds for the Web page to load, he said.

Google is aiming to shave time from this last step with Instant Pages, a new feature that predicts what the user will click on and starts loading the page before they actually do so. Instant Pages uses Google Instant search technology, along with pre-rendering technology built into in Chrome and Google's homegrown search relevance technology, Singhal said at a press conference in downtown San Francisco.

"In cases where we're confident you're going to click a result, Google pre-renders the page and you don’t experience any delays," said Singhal. "Sometimes when you click on a result, the page will be there practically instantaneously."

Instant Pages works by pre-rendering all the images, advertisements, styles sheets and Javascript files that comprise a Web page, but the key element is Google's ability to accurately predict what the user is looking for.

"This wouldn't be possible without relevance technology, because we have to predict what result users are going to click," said Singhal. "Pre-rendering is only used when you can predict the next action with a certain confidence; otherwise, it would be wasting a lot of bandwidth."

Instant Pages will be available this week in the Chrome beta, and it's available today in the Chrome Developer Version. Instant Pages will be available on mobile devices in the coming weeks.

Google is also taking its mobile voice search technology and making it available on the desktop for Chrome users. Google's Voice Search On The Desktop is particularly well suited to translating search terms in foreign languages and can differentiate between phonetically similar search terms.

To illustrate the technology's precision, Google engineers gave a demo at the press conference that showed how Voice Search On The Desktop is able to discern between "Worcester" and "College Of Wooster."

Google is also improving the capabilities of its image search technology with a new feature called Search By Image, which can determine where a photo was taken by gathering contextual data from the Web. It uses technology from Google Goggles on mobile to break down images into lines and forms, make measurements and return ranked results to end users, Johanna Wright, Google's director of search product marketing, said at the event.

Google is rolling out Search By Image globally on images.google.com over the next few days, Wright said. Users will be able to search by copy and pasting an image URL, dragging and dropping an image into a Web page, or by using Chrome and Firefox extensions to enable one-click search for images on the Web.