Google Inc. has unveiled new features and technology to speed up Web searches and to make it easier for people to use its flagship search engine as they increasingly access the Internet from handheld mobile devices.
Google demonstrated a new feature called Instant Pages which allows certain Web pages to pop up in a user's Web browser nearly instantaneously, as well as a revamped version of its website for mobile devices.
Google, the world's No. 1 Internet search engine, said that traffic coming from mobile devices such as smartphones has increased by a factor of five during the past two years.
Voice Search, whereby people query Google by speaking aloud, has been available on mobile devices since 2008, but has not been possible on PCs or Macs until now. The speech recognition feature is useful for difficult-to-spell words and long phrases, according to Google.
Voice Search on desktop works using Google's Speech API and will be available to anyone using Chrome 11 in English. The feature, which will be released for 40 languages, also requires a working internal or external microphone.
