Google released two big search products today at an event at the Computer History Museum in San Francisco.
First up is Google Real Time Search. Google's new search feature uses AJAX to ad more search results into your results page as twitter pages are updated as well as breaking news items as they flow in from across the web.
Google stated in a blog post today:
Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day. Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we're announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.
It will be interesting to see how this works next time the next huge breaking news story hits.
Perhaps more interesting is Google Goggles. Google Goggles allows you to take a picture with your smartphone (Android only at the moment). Google then uploads it to their servers. Google then takes that image and tries to identify it using text recognition, GPS data and image recognition software. The software is still in the pre-beta-beta "Labs" testing phase but it appeared to work pretty well in the live demonstration they gave at the show.
The only thing I can think of that comes close to this functionality is Amazon's iPhone app which uses humans to look at images and guess the Amazon product most closely affiliated with it.
Goggles is available on any Android phone with OS 1.6 or greater on board. Google Real Rime Search will be rolled out over the next few days.