Google launches new search features as mobile traffic growth explodes

Internet giant Google released a suite of new search features overnight with an emphasis on location and pre-rendering websites that should make SME owners stop and evaluate how they are approaching not only their mobile strategy, but the design of their website.

The search updates also come alongside a new approach from Google towards display ads, with the company spending $US400 million on a display ads creator as part of a new approach towards ads that will harness more interactivity and increase impressions.

Google launched the new initiatives last night at a dedicated search event in San Francisco, where it continued to emphasise that more users will be searching on their mobiles and the company needs to respond.

“The thirst for knowledge doesn’t stop when you step away from your computer, it continues on your mobile device. In the past two years, mobile search traffic has grown five-fold. Mobile search today is growing at a comparable pace to Google in the early years.”

The company showed off data showing mobile search traffic growth over the past three years is comparable to overall Google search traffic growth recorded during its first few years.

One of the most significant changes of the day was the announcement that Google mobile’s home page will now come with shortcuts that will allow users to find local businesses.

The home page now features symbols with different headings like “restaurants”, “cafes” or “bars”. Once a user clicks on one of those shortcuts, they will be taken to a Google Maps page that shows them all the nearest locations in that area for the topic they’ve chosen.

Google says this will allow businesses with their details already put into the Google Places system to be located, highlighting the importance for businesses to fill out these details in full.

But Google also launched a new initiative called Instant Pages, which may make businesses think about how easy their pages can load.

Just as Instant Search allowed users to find new results as they were actually typing in a query, Instant Pages will actually pre-render the first few results of a new search so when users click on them, the users won’t have to wait for those pages to loud.

“Instant Pages can get the top search result ready in the background while you’re choosing which link to click, saving you yet another two to five seconds on typical searches,” Google says.

While Instant Pages will only work on the Chrome browser, Google notes that it will only prerender results “when we’re confident you’re going to click them”.

“The good news is that we’ve been working for years to develop our relevance technology, and we can fairly accurately predict when to pre-render,” it says.

The change means developers will need to place an even higher importance on staying within the top few search results so they can be pre-rendered. It also means those sights need to be easier to load – if Google can’t even pre-render a page in time because of heavy graphic requirements, users may be less likely to stay there and look at another result.

Google also released voice recognition search for Chrome desktop, which says it can now recognise 230 billion words from actual queries. “

“As the quality has increased, so has usage: in the past year alone, Voice Search traffic has grown six-fold, and every single day people speak more than two years’ worth of voice to our system.”

While voice recognition has already been available on Android, this is the first time Google has brought it to desktop computers.

Another new feature is the “search by image”, which will allow users to upload any picture and use Google to find out what it is. Google says this can be used to identify landmarks and other settings – and it’s rolling out globally as well.