Microsoft's Bing search engine still holds less than 10 percent of the search market, or about one-sixth of Google's market share. Still, Bing has generated a significant amount of buzz, and it appears that buzz has awoken the sleeping search giant.
Google announced a slew of new search innovations on Monday, including ways to search by taking a photo, and social media search results that stream on the page in real-time.
The live social media results will incorporate real-time updates from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other social media outlets in a ticker that appears on search results pages under the label "latest news." For example, if you search for "Tiger Woods," you will see news results for the golfer, followed by a continuous stream of tweets, blog posts, and articles moments after they are posted.
The real-time search will work for local searches as well, including queries about traffic and weather, according to Google. Users can also filter results to see only updates from social networks. Google had previously announced a deal to add Twitter content to its search results, but this new search feature will also incorporate content from Facebook and MySpace, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Another new feature Google unveiled on Monday was "Google Goggles," a visual search application that allows users to search for more information about an object by taking a photo of it with their mobile phones. Google Goggles is currently only available for phones running Google's Android operating system.
