Google launches five new services and tweaks

Google announced a series of new services and updates today, which impact how we search for information.

• Mobile search: a “Near Me Now” feature added, which returns information about local businesses.
• Real-time search: Google now crawls “live”, publicly accessible sources, including news, blogs, Facebook pages, MySpace updates, and Twitter. The torrent of such information is strained for relevancy, behind the scenes. (example below)
• Visual search: “Google Goggles” (for Android phones) lets users take a photo of something, then search for information about it.   Optical character recognition (OCR) scans text, while GPS identifies location.
• Voice search: expanded to more languages (Japanese, Mandarin Chinese), more complex queries.

An example of real-time search:

In addition, a prototype voice translation function was demonstrated.  Release is estimated for 2010.