Highlights From Google Inside Search 1: Voice Search on Google and Search By Image

The Google Inside Search event was held recently where Google talked about some new technologies that it plans to roll out to their search engine soon. In fact, they have already begun rolling out the new features in the US.

In the first part of this series, we’ll take a look at two important, user-friendly features that you’ll soon be able to use while conducting searches on Google: Voice search and search by image.

Voice Search

If you remember, last year we talked about Google’s introduction of voice search in Android. Google has been steadily improving mobile voice search and it’s speech recognition tool, in their own words, now uses “230 billion words from real queries so that we can accurately recognize the phrases people are likely to say.”

Now, Chrome users will soon find this feature built in right into the Google search box when they visit google.com.

If you are using Chrome 11 or higher, and have a mic attached to your PC then you can click on the mic in the Google search bar (as it is shown in the image above) and say your query. This could be useful for searching really long queries or searches that are easy to say but hard to type due to their difficult spelling. It can also come in handy when your hands are not free to type. You can just say your search out loud.

Search By Image

A picture is worth a thousand words. Google realized it and decided that it should also let users use images as search queries instead of just the plain old text. And that’s how the “Search by Image” feature was born.

Do you see the camera icon in Google Image Search in the screenshot above? Well, if you see that on your computer too when you’re on images.google.com then you have this feature. You can drag and drop images onto that camera icon and let Google find information related to that.

You may also upload an image by clicking on the camera icon, or paste the URL of an image by clicking on the camera icon and selecting paste image URL.

The feature is being rolled out slowly so it could take some time before you see that in your browser. We’ll talk about more new features tomorrow in the next part of this series.