Amidst the industry's focus on the growing popularity of smartphones and tablets, Google, Inc., operator of the world's most popular search engine, said at an event in San Francisco California, it has made improvements for conducting Web searches in desktops, the device still used for the bulk of queries in Google.

Apple Inc. has sold 25 million units of its iPad tablet since its April 2010 debut. Research firm International Data Corp. said last month it expects that there will be 50 million tablet shipments in 2011, with Apple maintaining 70 percent to 80 percent of the tablet market. However, desktop computers and laptops continue to outsell tablets. While nearly 18 million tablets were shipped in 2010, more than 346 million personal computers were shipped, with Hewlett Packard grabbing 18.5 percent of the market, and Dell, Inc. having 12.3 percent.

Voice Search

Google, which handles around two-thirds of U.S. Web searches, announced that it is bringing its speech recognition technology to the desktop. First offering speech recognition on mobile search, Google has added Voice Search on the desktop for Chrome users. Now Chrome users will start seeing a little microphone in every Google search box.

Google, which faces competition in the search engine market from Microsoft Corp.'s Bing, said, "You can just speak your query and the answer is on the way. We've invested tremendous energy into improving the quality of our recognition technology-for example, today we teach our English Voice Search system using 230 billion words from real queries so that we can accurately recognize the phrases people are likely to say. As the quality has increased, so has usage: in the past year alone, Voice Search traffic has grown six-fold, and every single day people speak more than two years worth of voice to our system."

Goggles

A Google mobile application, Goggles, launched in 2009, lets mobile-device users get information about digital photos they take with their device. Now the search giant is introducing Goggles' Search by Image feature on the desktop.
"Next to the microphone on images.google.com, you'll also see a little camera for the new Search by Image feature. If you click the camera, you can upload any picture or plug in an image URL from the web and ask Google to figure out what it is. Try it out when digging through old vacation photos and trying to identify landmarks-the search [mountain path] probably isn't going to tell you where you were, but computer vision may just do the trick. Search by Image is rolling out now globally in 40 languages," Google said.
Google is also releasing Chrome and Firefox extensions that enable users to search any image on the web by right-clicking.

Google Instant

Last year, to make Web searches faster, Google introduced Google Instant, which gives users search results while typing. Google Instant saves between two and five seconds on typical searches. But once a result is picked, the users have to wait for the page to load-for an average of about five seconds, Google pointed out.

"We want to help you save some of that time as well, so today we took the next step for Google Instant: Instant Pages. Instant Pages can get the top search result ready in the background while you're choosing which link to click, saving you yet another two to five seconds on typical searches," Google said.

"As you scan the results deciding which one to choose, Google is already prerendering the top search result for you. That way when you click, the page loads instantly."