New Google features: Search by Image, Instant Pages

Google is adding new features for people to search by image and something called Instant Pages to speed up websites that show up in search results.

The company talked about the new features at a news event in Mountain View Tuesday morning. While Google is the dominant search engine on the web, second-place competitor Microsoft Binghas been rolling outnew features every couple months.

Here is what the new features are about.

Search by Image. Instead of searching with words, you can do a search by dragging an image over the Google search box. This works both with photos on the Web and with photos stored on your computer.

The feature builds in Google Goggles, which lets you snap a photo with a mobile phone camera and do a search on your phone.

Google says it's rolling out now in 40 languages.

I've tried to test this image search feature several times this morning but I can't get it to work. I keep dragging images over the search box, but it just pastes the image on to the Web page. It's possible it has not rolled out to Seattle yet, although presumably Google would want the Bing team in Redmond to ooh and aah over it.

Instant Pages. When you do a search on Google and click on the results, the website will show up faster because Google will preload the website as you search. This works on the next version of Google's Web browser Chrome, which is now available in a beta test version.The Chrome browser competes with Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox.

Here is a Google video below of how Search by Image is supposed to work. If you're able to get it to work for you, let me know in the commentssection or tweet me @sharonpianchan.

And here is the Google blog post about the new features. The blog post has some interesting data about how mobile search is growing.

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