It’s been an uncommonly busy week for Google search. On Monday, the company unveiled its new real-time search feature and Google Goggles visual search. Now it’s ending the week with two additional meaningful new features. (And hey, it celebrated Popeye on its home page in between.)
New feature #1: Google Suggest, the feature that starts providing possible queries as you type, now provides possible answers in some cases.
The feature in its current form is fairly limited: It includes ten types of information (weather, flight status, local time, area codes, package tracking, answers, definitions, calculator, currency, and unit conversions) and is only smart enough to figure out what you’re typing with certain phrasings of questions. (It seems to work best if you use as few words as possible rather than typing in wordy questions.) But at its best, it’s kind of eerie–Google gives you answers while you’re still typing.
New feature #2 is only for folks running the beta of Chrome 4 for Windows, but it’s also neat: It’s Quick Scroll, which auto-scrolls to sections of Web pages relevant to queries you’ve searched for–once you’ve clicked off Google onto a site in the results.
Quick Scroll is clever and useful. It’s interesting, though, to see it debuting as a Chrome extension–even though vastly more folks could take advantage of its goodness if it was a Firefox one. Google’s blog post on the new features doesn’t mention if the company plans to make it more widely available, but this is the most recent evidence that Google is starting to favor its own products in a way it hadn’t in the past.
Google announced several interesting things at its press event today, including 
Microsoft’s Bing search engine went offline this evening, greeting visitors with an 
I kinda doubt that anyone involved planned it this way, but yesterday provided an interesting study in contrasts between the world’s biggest search engine and its most notable rising star. In the morning, I attended a Bing press event. It was highlighted by the debut of a 
At a press event in San Francisco this morning, Microsoft demonstrated recent, brand-new, and upcoming features it’s adding to its 
It’s become a tradition for the major search engines to release year-end summaries of what their users have been searching for–and for reasons unknown to me, all of them unveil these lists on December 1st, so they really cover 11/12th of the year.
