Google Upgrades Search with Real-Time and Mobile Features

It was bound to happen, but is quite exciting nonetheless. Google Search has now added support for real-time search results.

Now when you search for any topic, you will see a search section that is constantly being updated with new results. The real-time search section shows results from sources such as blogs, news, Twitter and FriendFeed. They’ve also revealed their partnership with Facebook, MySpace, Jaiku, and Identi.ca other than FriendFeed and Twitter for real-time search.

So searching for a trending topic such as “GM” is sure to give you a feed of people mentioning it in Twitter or on their blogs. By showing only the latest search results you get a full page with just a stream of real-time updates.

Check out a video by Google about their new realtime search features:



With this, they are also graduating Google Trends from Labs after adding a new “Hot Topics” feature that shows some of the trending topics on Google search.

For mobile devices, Google is redefining the way searches are conducted by utilizing additional data available with such devices. On mobiles, besides just a text query, more data can be utilized to get a more context sensitive and accurate search result.

On mobile devices, Google Search can now conduct voice search in Japanese. Google Maps has also added a feature that can take into account your location and perform a search of “what’s nearby”.

One of the most exciting new search features would have to be Google Goggles, a new feature for mobiles that lets you search using images instead of text. With Google Goggles, you merely point your camera to the object in question, whether it is a book, a monument, an artwork or logo and Google will look it up for you. With this new feature, you can simply point your camera at a landmark and click a picture and find out its name, and other search results.

Google can also keep a “visual search history” similar to web history feature that lets you see all the images you’ve searched before.

Check out a video by Google of how it works: