One of the most promising of these is Google's advanced voice search technology, already available on certain Android mobile devices. The company is now rolling out the same voice search capabilities for its Chrome web browser, allowing you to simply spit a phrase at your computer and see the results rolling in.

Google's English voice recognition system has been taught a massive 230 billion words based on real queries and phrases. Thanks to this users can easily search for hard to spell or obscure searches by simply speaking it to your browser.

Chrome users will start seeing a microphone icon appear in their Google search boxes over the next few days. You simply click on the icon and state your search, as simple as that. Remember that this requires a built-in or external microphone to work. At the time of writing voice search does not appear to have been implemented on Google's South African portal as of yet, but the company is promising roll-out “over the next few days”.

The company is also introducing its new Search by Image feature on desktops, with a camera icon appearing in the search box on images.google.com. When clicking on the new icon users will be able to either upload any of their own pictures, or specify an image URL on the web and ask Google to try and figure out what it is.

According to the company, this can be especially useful when combing through old vacation photos, with the search feature able to identify unique landmarks (from bridges to mountain paths) which might otherwise be unidentifiable to you. The Search by Image feature is rolling out globally in 40 languages over the next few days.

In addition to allowing users to search via voice and pictures, Google is also aiming to make your online search experience as fast as possible. To do this the company introduced Google Instant last year, which displays relevant results while you type. Now Google is introducing Instant Pages, the next step for Google Instant.

Instant Pages will help users save an additional couple of seconds on their searches by pre-rendering the top search result while you're still deciding which link to click on. This way, when you click on the top result the page will load almost instantly.

The company says that Instant Pages will pre-render results, “when we're confident you're going to click them”. Through their years of web search experience Google is confident it can accurately predict which pages to pre-render, but if you decide on a different result it'll be the same as a normal search, so nothing lost there. Instant Pages will be available with the next beta release of the Chrome browser, but if you're feeling adventurous you can try out the developer version right now.

Check out the video below to see Chrome’s voice search in action, and for more videos head on over to the Google blog.