Today at its Inside Search event in San Francisco, Google hasannouncedInstant Pages, a feature that delivers results for searches instantaneously. In the demonstration, Google showed that a search result could take 3-5 seconds to appear on a local machine, but with Instant Pages the result is delivered immediately. Notice the counter at the bottom of the screenshot showing the time-to-load. Google is able to perform this seemingly instant delivery by pre-caching the pages while you peruse the search results from your query....

In anannouncementthat was posted briefly to its mobile blog but then pulled, Google announced some new features coming to the mobile homepage of Google.com for Android and iOS devices. These include shortcuts that should make it easier to perform local searches as well as a refined version of mobile search. With more searches happening when people are on the go, we’ve noticed an increase in searches for nearby places. To make it easier for people to search for what’s around them, we’ve introduced new shortcuts to commonly searched local categories, like restaurants, coffee shops and bars, in the form of icons on the mobile google homepage....

Googlehas long had different search domains that catered to different countries and their languages. Google offers search on different regional domains, such asgoogle.frfor France andgoogle.djfor Djibouti, in order to provide the most locally-relevant results. Google has steadily broughtits search engineto many of the world’s domains, and today it was announced on ourGoogle Arabia Blogthat its adding two more:google.iqfor Iraq andgoogle.tnfor Tunisia. This brings the number of local Google search domains worldwide to 184, with 15 domains in Arab countries....

Google hasannouncedVoice Search for desktop machines today. This feature is available right in the browser on any desktop machine and appears right next to the search box. In addition, they also announced the ability to drag and drop an image into the search bar to search for its contents using Search by Image. Google says that in the last year, the volume of speech input has increased by a factor of 6....

Earlier today, Google sent out a promotional email to people in its Google Nest (formerly, Google Home) ecosystem. It was mostly your everyday was your everyday marketing email, except the eagle-eyed folks at9to5Googlenoticed something off about the included image of the company’s Pixel Buds: it appeared to be a photo of an unreleased model. Behold: And a closer look: Notably, these Pixel Buds have a dark green color that the current model isn’t available in....