Google Announces New Image Search Functionality

Via The Atlantic Wire:

Google announced a suite of new features Tuesday at their Inside Search event in San Francisco. Today's product revelations are less life-changing but show how the search giant is betting big on mobile with Yelp-like shortcuts added to their mobile app home screen, voice search with a new desktop function and image recognition with a killer visual search tool. Google Instant just got a lot more instantaneous, too. Here's the full breakdown of announcements with some real-time reactions.

Mobile Home Screen Shortcuts - Citing a trove of data (see below) Google is making a very educated guess about what people want when they open the search app. With mobile usage spiking on night's and weekends, a new set of shortcuts will show you the restaurants, cafes and bars near you.

Voice Search on Desktop - A longtime staple on Google's mobile app, voice search is getting better and better. Product manager Mike Cohen boasted that the technology now supports 27 languages and dialects.

Search by Image - The new search by image tool allows you to drag an image from your desktop into the search input field and hitting "search" will return a slew of images matching yours.

Instant Pages - Starting next week in the Chrome browser, Google will preload top search results into your browser."

Check out all the new features here.