If you’re interested in the future of Search and have got an hour and a half to spare, I highly recommend sitting down with your favorite beverage and watching this video.

In this video, Google presents their most significant product releases of the year, including real time search.

Marissa Mayer starts off by presenting four main areas of innovation at Google:

1. Modalities
How people search, e.g. mobile devices, voice search, search by taking a picture
2. Media
The types of media appearing in search results, e.g. maps, books, video, news
3. Language
Translation services which open up the world’s content to people of all languages
4. Personalization
Search results with higher relevance based on your location, social networks, etc.

Later in the talk, Google Fellow Amit Singhal talks about the huge relevancy challenges faced when delivering search results, especially now with real time search. He shared Google’s 4 pillars of search delivery:

Comprehensiveness,
Relevancy,
User Experience, and
Speed,

with relevancy becoming more and more difficult. The audience poses several important questions near the end of the presentation, including the question of whether Google uses the same algorithm to rank its general index as its real time results.

Real Time Search is being rolled out gradually for all users over the next few weeks. Whether these results appear or not will depend on the keyword used. There is a way to see real time search results right away, through Google Trends.

To see an example of Google’s Real Time Search in action, check out:
http://www.google.com/search?esrch=&tbs=rltm:1&tbo=u&hl=en&q=snow

Google made a couple of significant product announcements this week. Below you’ll find brief introductions to Google Goggles (image recognition on the Android phone) and real time search results on the Google search results page.