Google Improves Search on Cell Phones

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Google Inc unveiled a slew of new and future features on Tuesday, including one that will allow people to better coordinate Internet searches on their cell phones and computers and another that will produce sophisticated automated research reports.

At a briefing at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, executives demonstrated tools to knit its search product on personal computers more closely with cell phones, as well as products to automatically troll the Internet for research topics and generate detailed spreadsheets.

Google also showed off a new feature, available immediately, that lets users view only the most timely search results, narrowing the results for a topic to the past 24 hours or the past week.

Google said it will search blogs and news sites, as well as the general information available online, to provide a fresher picture of certain subjects.

This feature comes amid the rising popularity of so-called real time search products, like the search feature on microblogging site Twitter, which allow users to search up-to-the-minute developments about certain topics online.

Google said users will be able to display results by type of information, such as videos.

A new feature under development will allow a search performed on a desktop PC to automatically show up when the same user logs on to Google from a Web-enabled cell phone.

A tool called Google Squared, available next month, will automatically troll for information on the Internet to create spreadsheets about the topics a person searches.

In the demonstration, a search for small dogs generated a table that listed different breeds of dogs, with key information such as weight and height.

Google executives said they did not expect the product to increase friction with online content publishers who are concerned Google is profiting from their work.

In response to a question about this, Google Vice President of Search Products and User Experience Marissa Mayer said Google Squared is very strong in citing where the content in the tables it creates comes from, ultimately driving traffic back to the content creator site.

“The tools we’re launching today offer whole new ways of searching that haven’t previously been available,” said Mayer.